Four years ago we introduced Continuous Delivery into a highly regulated environment for a FTSE250 company. At the time it had an engrained release process that involved weekend maintenance windows, monthly offshore regression cycles and a complex delivery process. It was all very stressful. Listen to a selection of stories starting from how we lobbied the first POC based on an initiative from a devops bookclub to releasing our trading application more times in the last month than the previous year. All without an architecture rewrite, off the shelf tooling or a companywide mandate. Come and learn our strategies for change.
1. Changing a culture to a culture of
change
Joseph.mckevitt@ig.com
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Changing a culture to a culture of change
2. The butterfly effect
• A couple of book suggestions….
Changing a culture to a culture of change
3. Agenda
• The journey of CD adoption in a highly regulated financial institution
• A few stories (40 mins)
• Q & A (10 mins)
Changing a culture to a culture of change
4. This is not a talk on
• Introduction to Continuous
Delivery
• Selling Continuous Delivery
• Continuous delivery engineering
practices
• Test automation
Changing a culture to a culture of change
5. Take away
Strategies for CD adoption in your organisation
Changing a culture to a culture of change
6. World’s No.1 spread
betting provider
Established global markets
lead over 40 years
FTSE 250 company
Changing a culture to a culture of change
12. Monthly Releases
• 8 week release cycle
• 4 weeks development cycle
• 4 weeks regression cycle
• Release out of hours
Changing a culture to a culture of change
13. Positive aspects of release trains
• Monthly deliverables
• Clear delivery alignment
• Good team collaboration
Changing a culture to a culture of change
28. Promote our success - Friday nights are back!
Changing a culture to a culture of change
29. The reaction
“Sounds great, but its unlikely we can apply it to our critical workflows”
[Development]
“Doubling up your infrastructure. What a waste of resource!”
[Operations]
“Releasing during core hours…cowboys!”
[Development & Operations]
Changing a culture to a culture of change
32. Lets get Serious
Act 3 - 2013
Don’t waste time learning the "tricks of the trade." Instead, learn the trade - Brown
Changing a culture to a culture of change
33. Focused on solving a single problem
Can we do zero downtime deploys on mission critical apps?
Changing a culture to a culture of change
45. The Reaction
“Okay this is cool, tell us how we can do it”
[Development]
“What can we do to help you guys scale this?”
[Operations]
“The guys don’t murder me for asking for late changes”
[Trading API Product owner]
Changing a culture to a culture of change
57. Moved from Monthly releases, to weekly
releases to daily releases over a few months
The more confidence, the more aggressive
the release cadence
Changing a culture to a culture of change
59. Quality improvements
Before CD
55 Man days of regression –
10,000 test cases
After CD
6 Man days of regression –
tailored to each release
Changing a culture to a culture of change
60. Team Culture
• I feel empowered [QA Lead]
• Forces close collaboration
• Time to think
Changing a culture to a culture of change
61. Promote our success – Releasing every day
Changing a culture to a culture of change
62. The Reaction
“You deploy 3 or 4 times a week…seriously?”
[IT department]
“Why can’t all the teams do this?”
[Operations]
Changing a culture to a culture of change
65. a lot done, more to do
Act 5 - Today
Excellence/Perfection is not a destination; it is a continuous journey that never
ends - Tracy
Changing a culture to a culture of change
69. Summary
• Started with a simple Pilot
• Practised on more simple Pilots
• Migrated Trading API
• Migrated the Web Trading Platform
Changing a culture to a culture of change
70. Focus on one problem at a time
• Introduce zero downtime deploys to non-critical flows
• Introduce zero downtime deploys to critical flows
• Done means in Production
• Greenfield CD projects – One click releases
• Migrating the crown jewels onto a CD friendly architecture
• Releasing WTP outside the release cycle (every 2 weeks)
• Releasing WTP 3-4 times a week
Changing a culture to a culture of change
71. Transparency - Alignment from the start
Respect People
Tell everyone what you are doing and why
Keep everyone updated
Share the lessons (good or bad)
Changing a culture to a culture of change
72. Build on your results
• CD enables better quality software
• CD practisers will help CD adoption
• Successful adoption cannot be mandated
• Incremental improvements and a clear vision over detailed upfront
planning
• Target your adoption strategy towards uncertainity
Changing a culture to a culture of change
73. References
Online Content
• Continuous Delivery with Jez Humble
• http://www.meetup.com/London-Continuous-Delivery/
• Spotify engineering culture
Audio Content
• SE Radio
• Episode 221: Jez Humble on Continuous Delivery
• Episode 234: Barry O’Reilly on Lean Enterprise
Changing a culture to a culture of change
75. Culture is how we do things around here in order to succeed
Changing a culture to a culture of change
76. Questions
Help us go further with Continuous Delivery…
http://www.iggroup.com/careers/teams/technology
https://labs.ig.com/blog
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