Continuous Delivery WhitePaper

Continuous Delivery in a Nut Shell

Whatever may be the type or size of the industry, transformation is the key to improvement. Continuous Delivery (aka CD) is emerging as the front runner in the race of transforming IT business from “Slow Delivery” to “Quick and Reliable Delivery”. In combination with right Agile methodology, CD is helping companies to reduce time from planning to production and hence allowing them to earn cash for their product/services faster and with better margins.

What’s in it for Me?
CD has something for everyone in different teams, product, companies or domains. For engineers in any domain (from textile to Software) it means to automate production plan and shipping finished product/services to customer faster and on regular intervals.

CD for Software Development.
From Software Development perspective, CD is divided in 5 components.

#1: Configuration Management. “Single Source Of Truth”
#2: CI and Build Management. “Early and Often”
#3: Testing. “Early, Repeatable and Ever Improving”
#4: IT and Infrastructure Management. “On-Demand and Scalable”
#5: Release Management. Ship Right Release at Right Time”

To set things right CD evolved with 8 basic principles.

Principle #1: The process for releasing/deploying software MUST be repeatable and reliable.
Principle #2: Automate everything possible!
Principle #3: If something is difficult or painful, do it more often.
Principle #4: Keep everything in source control.
Principle #5: Done means “released”.
Principle #6: Build quality in!
Principle #7: Everybody has responsibility for the release process.
Principle #8: Improve continuously.

Summary in a Nut Shell. 

* Special thanks to  David Farley & Jez Humble (as some text of this post is sourced from their book "Continuous Delivery")

Good to be Agile

It's been a long time that I wrote any blog, so now here I am again.
This time I think the best topic to share is working with Agile methodologies.

It's been more than four year now that I have been working with the same. Some initial questions may occur in the mind of the reader of this blog.

Questions like:
- What is actually AGILE?
- How can it make my work better?
- What are it's pros and cons?
- etc. etc.

By definition agile means quickly producing something useful and improving it over a period of time to the best of it's type.
But quick doesn't means to forget the real iterations required for the process.

I will put an example here:
Suppose you are developing a software, under waterfall model we start coding finish the project over a period of time and pass it to the customers.
But in agile we start coding get some thing usable (something like a prototype) pass it to the customers, then start improving it (taking help from customer's feedback). This ends up in a better end product as it includes customers feedback also. And a software which has passed phases like creating prototype, testing, retrofitting etc. (real time iterations), is of greater value to the customer.

There are various Agile methods, our need defines as which one will suit us the best. Example:
KANBAN:  A method for developing products and processes with an emphasis on just-in-time delivery (using KAN="Visual" BAN="Board" technique) while not overloading the developers. With proper use of Kanban, projects are able to eliminate bottlenecks from any part of development cycle.

SCRUM: It is an iterative and incremental development process, where effort is tracked by burndown charts (each sprint) and Velocity tracking (over many sprints). These metrics help in better, predictable sprint planning and hence delivering happy faces.

In the Soup

As trying to consolidate all my accounts under one roof, I tried migrating my blogs from Yahoo ID to Gmail ID.
But what a mess, I could only migrate the posts and not the profile data. I lost data like as "Since when I have been blogging" etc.

Hoping to get such feature in blogger.com which would allow to change Username OR the User ID without loosing blog stats.