Continuous Delivery with a Rapid Deployment Pipeline
Date: Jun 01, 2011Read the full transcript from this video below:
Continuous Delivery with a Rapid Deployment Pipeline
Yvette Francino: Hi, this is Yvette Francino from
SearchSoftwareQuality.com, here at Agile 2010 with Jez Humble from ThoughtWorks Studios who's
written a book, "Continuous Delivery." Can you tell us about that Jez?
Jez Humble: Sure. So, "Continuous Delivery" is about the problem of getting software from ...
[inaudible 00:14] live, which is a problem we see all the time in ThoughtWorks and most of the gigs
that we go to is that. When we put Agile software delivery processes in place, the development team
does a pretty good of actually getting software to the stage where features get done pretty
quickly; but then often, especially medium and large organizations, once the software is completely
ready, it then gets thrown over the wall to the development team, then straight to the testing
team, and then, at that point, you often find that the software isn't fit for purpose. And then,
once testing is done, it often gets thrown over the wall to the operations team to deploy, and at
that point you find that software isn't fit for use. It doesn't meet the performance requirements,
it's not sufficiently scalable, there are security problems, and even big architectural problems
get found at the time of deployment frequently.
So, what we're trying to do with the book is talk about two key things which will help software
delivery. One is first a collaboration between everyone involved in the delivery process and the
second thing is better automation of the bills, tests, and deployment process, so that everyone
involved in delivery can get feedback from the production readiness of their software all the way
through the lifecycle and teams can produce production ready software from the beginning and keep
software production ready all the way through the lifecycle.
Yvette Francino: Okay. Do the builds actually go into production when they're doing this or is it
just to continue to keep it production ready?
Jez Humble: So, one of the practices you talk about in the book is continuous deployment, which is
the practice of taking every build that passes the automated tests and you can have a manual QA
gate as well. And every build that passes that process actually goes into production. That's
certainly one possibility. It doesn't always make sense for everyone, but I think once you're doing
things in the book that we talk about, it's very simple to turn a switch and use that process if
you want to.
Yvette Francino: Okay. Thank you very much.
Jez Humble: It's a pleasure. Thank you.