Making Continuous Delivery happen - ThoughtWorks Talks Tech March 2019

Yesterday, I presented on “Making CD happen” at the ThoughtWorks Talks Tech March 2019 edition at the ThoughtWorks Singapore office

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I use slides to support my message, so there is sometimes context around the various slides.

Over the past few years, organisations have been increasingly recognising that along with governance and project management (read, scrum), they need to pay attention to engineering practices too. The result has been an increasting move to achieve Continuous Delivery (or “CI/CD” as it is unfortunately often also known).

The reality is that the IT budget went into expensive scrum and “CI/CD” tool implementations, dedicated staff, and so on.

With a plethora of tools and consultants, lots of tutorials and IT budgets assigned to such initiatives, there are a lot of implementations out there which are not yet delivering results.

  • There are still defects in production
  • There is a lot of wait-time between code-commit to go-live
  • Triaging defects continues to take time
  • Integration between workstreams continues to be risky
  • Fixing a defect doesn’t guarantee that nothing else got broken
  • Changes pushed to prod often leads to failures
  • What works in one environment doesn’t work in others

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Talk - Migrating your IT policies to the Cloud

Today, I presented at Cloud Asia Singapore 2018 on the topic “Migrating your IT policies to the Cloud”.

Moving to the Cloud is more than just getting an account at a public cloud. Even a lift and shift approach needs quite some thought to the design.

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Some standup anti-patterns

See my slide deck that I usually use when giving a talk on this topic.

Among the many practices that people start to follow when they decide to “go agile”, is the daily standup.

Jason Yip’s article on standups is often considered the reference article (that’s me in the red t-shirt in that pic).

Over the years, various organisations and teams have adopted the practice of a standup along with many other practices in the hopes of being Agile. As an outside observer, I often get to spot various anti-patterns in standup practices.

Here are some standup anti-patterns to identify and address:

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Talk - On Standups

Here is the slide deck to a popular talk that I give on standups. I recommend that you also read the accompanying article.

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segregation of duties and continuous delivery

Today, I presented on “Segregation of Duties and Continuous Delivery” at the DevSecCon Singapore 2017.

The talk was well received.

As per the wikipedia article on [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_duties], “ In business the separation by sharing of more than one individual in one single task is an internal control intended to prevent fraud and error.”

In the I.T. space, the approaches for implementing Segregation of Duties are very defensive in nature. While the objectives of SoD are arguably achieved, the present enforcement approaches slow down the overall time from code commit to production deployment. This prevent effective Continuous Delivery.

In my talk, I present the intent, the current approaches, and my recommended alternative approaches.

This talk with be one of the chapters of my upcoming book on Security and Continuous Delivery.

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migrating to a static website

I’ve decided to try static website hosting using Hugo.

My earlier blog can be accessed here

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