AMA on Wednesday, April 8th, on all things CI/CD

[Bridget]

Hello Community members!

On Wednesday, April 8th, from 2-3 PM PST, Ian Buchanan and Antonia Verdi from the Atlassian team will be LIVE on Community to answer your questions.

Ian is Developer Partisan for Developer Tools at Atlassian where he focuses on the emerging DevOps culture and the tools for enabling better continuous integration, continuous delivery, and data analysis.

Antonia Verdi is a Technical Training Specialist at Atlassian, where she trains onboards new and existing customer-facing Atlassians on the Atlassian tool suite.

In case you missed their talk from Remote Summit 2020, you can watch the recording here: Everything you learned about CI/CD is wrong

Feel free to submit your questions before the AMA goes live - Ian will be sure to address them when the time comes. 

We look forward to reading your questions - don't hold back! 

[Jimmy Seddon]

Hi Ian & Antonia!

I loved your presentation! Well actually it was very painful to watch as you called out many of the things our company is doing wrong :(

If I wanted to try and champion a call for change, where would you suggest I start?  Should I bring this to the managers of the development teams?

Any advice you can offer would be much appreciated!

Thanks!

-Jimmy

[devpartisan]

Jimmy,

Thank you!

There are 2 layers of guidance that come to mind: team-level and company-wide. I'll cover team-level, then invite Antonia to offer company-wide. She is on an enablement team, after all.

For teams, I would encourage self-assessment. You don't have to get super scientific. Most people working on the software day-to-day will know where the problems are. Maybe just have a group voting session to build shared understanding of where the most pain lies. Antonia and I digested many sources to come up with our quick 8. If teams don't find enough inspiration in that, try Atlassian's Continuous Delivery content. Or if your team is ready for the most advanced concepts, try the book Accelerate, which is just over a couple years old.

Most teams these days have some kind of retrospective backlog or “20% time” in which they can take the small steps that we talked about. We believe that it is important for teams to have a shared understanding of what it means to perform well. From there, improvement is just a matter of incremental work on the obstacles. Getting better at delivering software is like building the bridge as you walk on it.

Antonia, what do you recommend for company-wide improvement?

Ian

[Antonia V.]

Jimmy, I’m glad you enjoyed our preso! 

 You asked a good question. From an enablement perspective, I believe that CI/CD is very much a team-learning activity that should involve the whole company (or at least all your teams that have anything to do with development). In fact, our talk was inspired by a training course Ian and I built for internal education on CI/CD, that involves a hands-on activity to really help our teams understand why these concepts really work (and why other practices are not as effective). We also offer self-service materials as well. Going this route is more a grassroots approach, in that we proved its value to the teams actually doing the job, and then the ideas took off from there. 

For a more “tops down” approach, if you have a centralized enablement team, they would be a good resource to turn to for assistance in spreading the word. If your company doesn’t have an enablement team, you could also consider outsourcing and pulling in some expert consultants to assist. I think this can be a great boost when a company-wide knowledge gap exists. For instance, if nobody really understands coding standards, it’s OK to get help from outside, while teams learn. 

There are some Atlassian Solutions Partners that might be able to help train your company on healthy CI/CD practices. If you’re trying to convince leadership of the values of CI/CD, we also have this awesome interactive DevOps workshop that not only teaches the value of CI/CD, but also all of the other practices associated with DevOps. I like that one a lot because it’s very hands on (as you can tell from my answer, I am a big fan of hands-on trainings, I think they help the knowledge “stick” better). 

~Antonia

[Jimmy Seddon]

Thank you both very much for the very detailed answers, I think I have a good starting point now to try and make some positive changes :D