Exercise 8: Continuous Delivery & Release Management

Question 1

Motivation

Answer 1

How it is often done: Delivery only after the implementation was finished

• Rare releases during development
• Little feedback from clients and users during development
• Target Environment != Development Environment

Question 2

Definitions RElease Management - Continuous Delivery

Answer 2

• Release management is the process of managing software releases from development stage to software release
• A release manager has different responsibilities:
  
  • Facilitator: serves as a liaison between varying business units to promote smooth and timely delivery of software products or updates
  • Coordinator: utilized to coordinate disparate source trees, projects, teams and components
• Continuous Delivery is an approach in which teams keep producing valuable software in short cycles and ensure that the software can be reliably released at any time.
• It is used in software development to automate and improve the process of software delivery

Question 3

“DevOps”

Answer 3

• “DevOps” (Development + Operations) is a software development method that emphasizes communication, collaboration, integration, automation, and measurement of cooperation between software developers and other IT professionals (e.g. operations)
• Code Quality Manager
• Release Manager
• Product Quality Manager

Question 4

Continuous Delivery: Benefits and Challenges

Answer 4

• Benefits
  
  • Accelerated time to market
  • Building the right product: improved product quality and customer satisfaction
  • Improved productivity and efficiency
  • Reduced risk of a release failure
• Challenges
  
  • Organizational: Varying interests in different departments of an organization
  • Process: Traditional processes hinder continuous delivery
  • Technical: Maintainability of the source code & tailorable delivery workflows for heterogeneous project environments

Question 5

Continuous Delivery Workflow

Answer 5

Question 6

Continuous Integration Server

Answer 6

• Regularly checks for changes published to the version control server (pull) or is notified when changes are available (push)
• Builds the SW:
  
  • Compiles the source code
  • Execute test cases (regression testing)
  • Packages the software
  • Code signs the software
• Notifies developers about build status
  
  • Automatically detects multiple branches and creates a build plan for each branch (Bamboo)

Question 7

Continuous Delivery Server

Answer 7

• Distributes software to customers and users (a.k.a. Enterprise AppStore)
• Obtains user feedback about the usage of the software
• Collects crash reports
• Stores feedback and crash reports in an issue tracker (e.g. JIRA)

Question 8

Management Issues: Continuous Integration

Answer 8

• How long does the integration and execution of test cases take?
• Can you only execute the test cases related to the change? (Research issue)
• How often should you do it? (continuously, nightly, weekly)?
• Do you buy a build server (e.g. Bamboo), do you use an open source version (e.g. Jenkins) or do you build in the cloud (e.g. Travis CI)?
• How many build agents do you provide? (e.g. in POM we started with 3 and now we have 10. Is that enough?)
• ➡ A project manager needs to answer these questions

Question 9

Management Issues: Continuous Delivery

Answer 9

• How often do you deliver your application? (every change?)
• What process changes do you have to implement to make customers aware of multiple releases during development?
• How do you handle customers that do not react to releases?
• How many releases can a customer / user handle?
• How do you handle feedback within the Sprint?
• What needs to be done to implement continuous integration and delivery from scratch? (e.g. big bang, CI —> CD, CI —> CD —> feedback)
• How can you tailor the workflow to specific project needs?

Question 10

Best Practices

Answer 10

• The process for releasing/deploying software MUST be repeatable and reliable
• If somethings difficult or painful, do it more often.
• Automate everything
  
  • ➡ Write test cases
• Integrate your changes early and often
• Release early and often to obtain feedback
• Release internally first
  
  • Test it thoroughly
  • Then promote the release to your users
• React to crashes and user feedback
• Improve continuously