1 . From Infrequent to Continuous Delivery

Recently, I have found myself thinking of milk a lot. Not the most usual thing to think of, given that my work revolves around quality, testing, developer productivity.

Looking back, I have been through five rounds of transforming teams from infrequent releases to continuous delivery, and a lot of my distilled wisdom comes down to milk. 

The first story of milk I find myself telling, almost on repeat, is on the fact that test results are like milk – they go sour quite soon.

If you have test results from six months ago on a product succeeding in any way in the modern software organizations, change is a constant. Change takes us forward. It is a reaction of trying to create something of value. And in absence of change, we have learned to understand that the world around us changing means we are longer staying on board with what is needed.

We want to keep replenishing our test results, not only because we change our software, but because we are not able to stop the ecosystems we reside in from changing. 

It is not just test results that are like milk though. It is also our practices. Every single agreement made earlier deserves a regular replenish. Instead of collecting rule after rule, we should retire some of our rules as we come up with new ones. This creates a good platform for experimentation. 

Milk also comes around when thinking about how much of it we should stock. I remember an old experience where we stocked two with a roommate, and wanted to use older first, only to learn the plopping sound sour milk makes when you pour it into a coffee cup you hand to your neighbor visiting.

Having some of the same from a later batch gave us an opportunity to try again, and fix the problem we had just created for ourselves. Next batch can fix problems the previous batch reveals. 

Finally, I keep explaining that software is not like milk – it is not more expensive in small cartons. Quite the opposite. Smaller units of delivery keep risk at bay, and risk is expensive.

In this article, it is not really milk that I want to talk about.

I want to share my experience of facilitating a transformation into smaller batches of delivery deliberately to turn my specialty work – testing – from stress in the end to continuous flow of collaboration. I find that it is always been a journey and while I can imagine a destination of continuous deployment where software flows many times a day into production, for that level I am still on the journey.

The 5x Transformation

With 25 years in the industry, I found two guiding principles useful in my choices of where I work:

• Great testing depends on context but how could I recognize that context in action – experiencing clearly different contexts.
  
  
• Making suggestions as a consultant is not my level of involvement – I want to suffer / enjoy through the changes as someone in the software development team that is changing. 

I come to work on testing and I find myself changing how we deliver with quality, continuously. In hindsight, it is easy to see that it ended up being the same kind of change I guided five teams and myself through, and after multiple repeats, I also see how my approach has grown.

The five teams include three different product organizations, three significantly different delivery environments, and two different approaches to sufficient automation.