ROOTS 2011 schedule

Monday 23rd May 2011

VERSION CONTROL FOR CONTINUOUS DELIVERY

by Stein Inge Morisbak

Continuous delivery depends on the ability to deliver reliable software releases through build, test and deployment automation. This is often easier said than done, as it depends on a lot of hard work building a robust infrastructure to support the flow from development to production. One of these crucial tasks is to design a reliable, flexible, easy-to-use and easy-to-comprehend strategy for version control.

I have experienced many times that teams are not able to put new features, or even bug-fixes, into production within a reasonable amount of time (i. e. less than a day). The reason is often that their code base is unstable because they don't have a reasonable branching-, merging- and release strategy.

I will in this talk present an easy and comprehendible version control strategy that allows team members to develop a shared understanding of the branching and releasing processes. Teams not practicing continuous delivery will also find this model useful to avoid "merging hell", unstable code bases and the like. In the examples I give I will use Git, but any version control system supporting branching and merging, like SVN or CVS, could be used to implement the strategy.
- Continuous Delivery
- Version Control
At 2:30pm to 2:40pm, Monday 23rd May

Coverage video slide deck

Wednesday 25th May 2011

CONTINUOUS DELIVERY

by Stein Inge Morisbak and Ole Chr. Rynning

Getting software released to users can be risky, time-consuming and painful. The solution is the ability to deliver reliable software continuously through build, test and deployment automation, and through improved collaboration between developers, testers and operations. In this tutorial we will present principles and technical practices that enable teams to incrementally deliver software of high quality and value into production whenever they want, and extremely fast. The size of the project or the complexity of its code base does not matter.

In the first half of the tutorial we will introduce the concepts of continuous delivery, through continuous integration; and automation of the build, test and deployment process. We will also go through som basic principles and patterns for building automatable applications (architecture). We will cover experiences on team collaboration patterns and lastly; techniques for solving tasks such as an easy and comprehendible version control strategy.

The second half of the tutorial we will be working with automated provisioning of agile infrastructure, including the use of tools (puppet) to automate the management of testing and production environments. We will go through some scripting lessons examplifying how to implement zero-downtime deploys (… and rollback – if something goes wrong!), with examples in both bash and Ruby. Along with controlling the start, stop, restart lifecycles during deploys, we will also show some simple techniques for backups, logging, error handling, monitoring and verification of application health that can make the automation more robust.

We will also use servers "in the cloud" to demonstrate different techniques, and we hope to make it a fun day and to deliver software (examples) several times throughout the workshop.

Required knowledge: Agile/Lean basics, Linux basics, version control basics, maven basics.
At 9:00am to 3:00pm, Wednesday 25th May

Coverage slide deck