John Ruberto, Intuit, Inc.
We were not moving fast enough for our business stakeholders. Development and quality was constantly the bottleneck for delivering the cool ideas from our product managers and designers. Our release cycles took three weeks, with more than half of the effort dealing with technical debt. We typically needed a full hardening sprint for each iteration. Our business team wanted to move faster. We had to bridge the gap between development and deployment.
What our business team wanted was a Continuous Delivery system, or even better a Continuous Deployment system. As soon as a story is complete, it’s released to production. Each story does not have to wait for other stories, and our regression testing is completely automated.
We took this on as a challenge, and in six months implemented a Continuous Delivery system – where we push a story live on the day that story is completed. This paper will describe the changes we made with technology, mindset, and processes to achieve Continuous Delivery. It will also describe the principles, practices, and tools/methods which made this possible. Finally, a playbook is provided that can be used by others to make the same transformation.
Since we’ve implemented Continuous Delivery, our delivery velocity has doubled, the scope of the team has grown, and the engineering team is leading the charge on innovation.
John Ruberto, 2014 Technical Paper, Paper, Slides
