Abstract: Not every continuous delivery initiative starts with someone saying "drop everything. Let's do DevOps." Sometimes you have to grow your practice incrementally. And sometimes, you don’t set out to grow a practice at all-- you are just fixing problems with your process, trying to make things better.
I'll walk through a case study of how our team worked on an exemplar project for the Department of Defense to show that agile could work in a decidedly waterfall culture. I’ll also discuss techniques and tools we used to bring a DevOps mindset and continuous delivery practices into an environment that wasn't already agile.
I'll talk about how we were able to start in development, where we had the most control, with a "let's starting being agile" initiative and working on "why is continuous integration important?" From there, we tackled one problem after another, each time making the release a little easier and a little less risky. We incrementally brought our practices through other environments until the project was confidently delivering working, QA-tested, security-tested releases that were ready for production every two weeks. I’ll discuss the journey we took and the tools we used to get to build quality into our product, our releases, and our release process.
This session is aimed at people that are trying to adopt agile and continuous delivery, but might be worried that it can’t work in their particular environment due to the enterprise, the culture, or the regulations that surround them.
Learning Outcomes: - Continuous delivery isn’t a goal unto itself. It is a process to deliver better software faster.
- Developing a CD pipeline should be about reducing the biggest risks and increasing confidence in your software quality.
- Each problem you solve makes the process better, even if it uncovers more problems further down the pipeline.
- Just making your release process better might take you down the road to continuous delivery-- it doesn’t have to be a deliberate effort to get to DevOps.
- Agile and continuous delivery can succeed in environments that aren’t nimble and flexible by nature. Even the DoD can be agile.
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