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From bi-annual to fortnightly releases in 4 mon...

Thierry de Pauw
September 06, 2019

From bi-annual to fortnightly releases in 4 months for 15 teams and a single monolith

15 teams, 1 shared monolith, 1 release every 6 months, and product demand for 1 release every 2 weeks. How do you know where to start with Continuous Delivery, when you’re surrounded by technology and organisational challenges?

This is the journey of 15 teams and their 1 shared monolith, at a federal Belgian agency. They increased their throughput from bi-annual releases to fortnightly releases in under 4 months, achieving a state of Continuous Delivery.

We used the Improvement Kata as a continuous improvement framework to execute and measure organisational change, Value Stream Mapping to analyse the current delivery process, and the Theory Of Constraints to choose which changes to apply first and start off the organisational changes we needed to improve quality and drive down lead times.

Six months after achieving Continuous Delivery, I realised it was not the plan that helped the organisation. Instead, it was Fear Conversations that helped the organisation. They allowed us to uncover, locate and understand the stakeholders’ fears in order to mitigate these fears and navigate the difficult conversations we had to have.

If you thought Continuous Delivery was just for the happy few having trendy microservices, think again!

Thierry de Pauw

September 06, 2019
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  1. @[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io @[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io From bi-annual to fortnightly

    releases in 4 months for 15 teams and a single monolith Tenderhearted Thierry Korenlei & Graslei Ghent, Belgium
  2. @[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io 3-4 planned major releases per year 2017:

    3 major releases 2018: 2 major releases deployment lead time of 28 days consuming 334 person-days
  3. @[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io September 5th 2018: Can you help us

    go from bi-annual releases to fortnightly releases by the end of December 2018?
  4. @[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io “In preparing for battle I have always

    found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” -- Dwight Eisenhower, 1957
  5. @[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io Technological changes Version Control Test Driven Development

    Trunk Based Development Acceptance Test Driven Development Deployment Pipeline Contract Tests Continuous Integration Exploratory Testing Automated Configuration Smoke Tests Automated Infrastructure Test Data Management Evolutionary Architecture Monitoring & Alerting Database Migrations Incremental Releases source: Steve Smith
  6. @[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io Organisational changes Small Batch Sizes Everyone does

    On-Call Empowered Product Teams Continuous Change Review Cross-Functional Teams Traceability of Changes Shared Incentives Upskilling and Empowering Employees Blameless Post-Mortems Conway's Law Alignment You build it, You run it Continuous Improvement source: Steve Smith
  7. @[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io Major release ~ 6 months lead time

    5 months: accumulation of features 3 weeks: code freeze 1 week: production deployment Champagne 🍾🎉 🥂 334 person-days
  8. @[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io Theory of Constraints Every system has a

    bottleneck. Spending time optimising anything other than the bottleneck is an illusion.
  9. @[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io The Agency's Improvement Kata Set up a

    Deployment Pipeline ✔ Daily evaluation of failing tests Dedicated environment for automated acceptance tests Recreate database before running acceptance tests to clean up test data Stub 3rd party services Collect lead time and failure rate metrics from the deployment pipeline
  10. @[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io “... but plans are worthless when the

    fighting is once begun, and all depends on the inspiration of the moment.” -- a war correspondent for the British newspaper “The Daily News”, 1877 ➔ Fear conversations
  11. @[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io Meanwhile … 18/10: LT of 8h, 21/3529

    failing tests 29/10: LT of 4h, 545/5390 failing tests 05/11: no pipeline run for 5 days due to a Jenkins upgrade 23/11: first green pipeline, all tests are passing 🎉 After which the pipeline went red for another 2 weeks 😒
  12. @[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io It is possible to achieve Continuous Delivery

    without first reaching Continuous Integration. But we will not be able to sustain Continuous Delivery in the long run.
  13. @[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io @[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io Acknowledgments: Els, the one

    I love. Steve Smith for reviewing this presentation, always making sure I do not hide myself. Jeffrey Fredrick and Douglas Squirrel for including this case in “Agile Conversations” https://www.conversationaltransformation.com/ Johanna Rothman for reviewing and helping to improve the abstract. https://www.jrothman.com/books/write-a-conference-proposal-the-conference-wants-and-accepts/ Slidedeck: https://thinkinglabs.io/talks/from-bi-annual-to-fortnightly-releases Hello, I am Thierry de Pauw fancies dark chocolate, black coffee, peated whisky
  14. @[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io Bibliography Lean Enterprise (ch 6 Deploy Continuous

    Improvement), Jez Humble, Joanne Molesky, Barry O'Reilly Supplemental chapter to Accelerate: How to transform, Jez Humble The Improvement Kata, Mike Rother Measuring Continuous Delivery, Steve Smith The Goal, Eliyahu Goldratt A Practical Approach to Large-Scale Agile Development: How HP Transformed LaserJet FutureSmart Firmware, Gary Gruver, Mike Young, Pat Fulghum Dual Value Streams, Steve Smith Got a wicked problem? First, tell me how you make toast, Tom Wujec, TEDGlobal 2013 Agile Conversations, Jeffrey Fredericks and Douglas Squirrel