Continuous Confidence in Software Development

There. I have said it. This is the elephant in the room. For years, we as Dev Ops professionals, and as an industry have been talking about how to up our game using Continuous Integration.  We talk about our Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) or how we need to improve our QA Processes and deliver faster and with higher quality. We start implementing Continuous Integration and we try to implement Continuous Delivery and or Deployment. And you know what happens? We fail to do it the way others did. There are some examples that we try to wedge ourselves into. We try hard to mimic what others have done. And so we fail over time. Some of us, we get to where we want to be, but others...yeah...let's not talk about it! So what should we be doing? We should be talking about Continuous Confidence. We should be talking about what processes and what things are we doing that will help us get better confidence in our product. What will give others better confidence in our product. When...

There is a lot of talk on the Internet around Continuous Integration. There is a lot of push toward constant releases. Always releasing small portions, maybe even continuous deployment. There is a lot of tout people as towards releasing code 1000 times a day! People are in awe, and then, we try to reproduce the effects. We try to follow the example and release 100 times a day. So, we need to stop the insanity! Not Releasing Is Ok! We need to stop and look at our business model. We need to understand our requirements. We need to understand our customer base. Ask questions. Are we comfortable releasing code daily? Do our customers want us to release daily? Is our code base stable enough to release in a manner unnoticed by our customer? Does our product lifecycle make sense to release in this fashion? These questions are used to help guide discussions. We need to talk about and consider the importance of the confidence of the product. Without Confidence, Why Release? If we are not ...

At the very heart of Continuous Integration and Continuous Confidence, is the automated test. Why do we write a test? If for whatever reason we write a test just to pass, then we are doing it wrong. Let's explore that for a moment. Superfluous Testing When we write a test, do we test a getter and a setter? If we answer yes to this question, then let's ask: why, followed by do we have to? Now, these questions need to be answered by each organization, as each requirement is different, but we want to look at something different. We want confidence in our code, and in our release. If we were to draw a line from left to right and say on the left is 0 confidence and on the right is 100% confidence, how much confidence do you gain by testing that a better or a setter worked? Put another way, would we ever write a test that simply returned true? Now, there are some getters or setters that have logic in them, points where decisions are made and a code bran is taken. That's o...

Have we ever asked ourselves "Why are we doing continuous integration/delivery?" A weird question right? It Makes Sense Almost every shop we know of says we need to go faster and deliver more content at higher quality. We grind and toil to make that happen. We learn that we can automatically build and test code. Tests pass and we are good! We are happy. We pass the hard work over to QA and expect them to give our code the final blessing. Sometimes, let's be honest MOST of the time, it comes back and we have to work on something to fix it. The final OK is given and we send it to DevOps/IT and it is released to the wild. We are proud. We got it out. And yet, there is sometimes a sense of impending doom. A little voice in the back of our heads saying: just wait. Or saying "What did we miss?" If It Makes Sense, Why The Doubt? So if all the effort to do continuous integration is worth it then why do we have doubts? Why do we find doubts in other parts ...

Over the next little bit, we are going to delve into how Continuous Confidence changes our perspectives and rolls as we seek for further confidence in our code release. I want each of us to think back on when we were first introduced to Continuous Integration. Maybe this is the first time for some of us, so let me recap. Introduction To Continuous Integration Thoughtworks introduced a new way of developing code. They said, always integrate your code as quickly as you can. His allows for fast feedback. So their guideline is shortlived branching, maybe a day at longest. Keep everything on master, and keep it releasable. Now I remember when I was first introduced to Continuous Integration. We made an automated build  and test system. We were loving it. We said, "Ok, everyone develop solely on master." And we were off. So there we started and we did what "everyone else" did I tell he world: we called it continuous integration. And yet, as we went further and fur...

Continuous Confidence is not a new idea. Over the years, I have spent many hours thinking about, and witnessing multiple development shops implement their own understanding of Continuous Integration. Time and time again they fail to completely succeed. There are moments when there is fresh air and people are happy, but then something comes along to spoil that zen moment. After looking at what was happening, I came to realize that there is much more to continuous integration than what is really out there. People are funny creatures. When we have a problem, we try to find a solution. We will try anything and everything we can, that makes sense to us. If we don't understand it, then we shy away from it. If we are developers, we tend to judge the worthiness of a statement, and then if found lacking, we ridicule and mock it for not making sense. (Overstating the obvious for dramatic effect.) Here in is the key to understanding failure to implement Continuous Integration or Continuous ...