Dave Farley has been having fun with computers for nearly 30 years. Over that period he has worked on most types of software, from firmware, through tinkering with operating systems and device drivers, to writing games, and commercial applications of all shapes and sizes. He started working in large scale distributed systems about 20 years ago, doing research into the development of loose-coupled, message-based systems - a forerunner of SOA. He has a wide range of experience leading the development of complex software in teams, both large and small, in the UK and USA. Dave was an early adopter of agile development techniques, employing iterative development, continuous integration and significant levels of automated testing on commercial projects from the early 1990s. He honed his approach to agile development in his four and a half year stint at ThoughtWorks where he was a technical principal working on some of their biggest and most challenging projects. Dave is currently working for the London Multi-Asset Exchange (LMAX), an organization that is building one of the highest performance financial exchanges in the world, where they rely upon all of the major techniques described in this book.

Jez Humble has been fascinated by computers and electronics since getting his first ZX Spectrum aged 11, and spent several years hacking on Acorn machines in 6502 and ARM assembler and BASIC until he was old enough to get a proper job. He got into IT in 2000, just in time for the dot com bust. Since then he has worked as a developer, system administrator, trainer, consultant, manager, and speaker. He has worked with a variety of platforms and technologies, consulting for non-profits, telecoms, financial services and on-line retail companies. Since 2004 he has worked for ThoughtWorks and ThoughtWorks Studios in Beijing, Bangalore, London and San Francisco. He holds a BA in Physics and Philosophy from Oxford University and an MMus in Ethnomusicology from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He is presently living in San Francisco with his wife and daughter.

Foreword by Martin Fowler

Preface

Acknowledgements

About the Authors

Part I Foundations

1 The Problem of Delivering Software

2 Configuration Management

3 Continuous Integration

4 Implementing a Testing Strategy

Part II The Deployment Pipeline

5 Anatomy of the Deployment Pipeline

6 Build and deployment scripting

7 Commit Testing Stage

8 Automated Acceptance Testing

9 Testing Non-Functional Requirements

10 Deploying and Releasing Applications

Part III The Delivery Ecosystem

11 Managing infrastructure and environments

12 Managing Data

13 Managing components and dependencies

14 Advanced version control

15 Managing Continuous Delivery

Bibliography

Index

Continuous Delivery shows how tocreate fully automated, repeatable, and reliable processes for rapidly moving changes through build, deploy, test, and release. Using these techniques, software organizations are getting critical fixes and other new releases into production in hours - sometimes evenminutes - evenin large projects with complex code bases.

Jez Humble and David Farley begin by presenting the high-level principles and practices required to succeed with regular, repeatable, low-risk releases. Next, they introduce the "deployment pipeline," an automated process for managing all changes, from check-in to release. Finally, they discuss the "ecosystem" needed to support deployment pipelines, from infrastructure to data management and governance.

The authors introduce many state-of-the-art techniques, including in-production monitoring and tracing, dependency management, and the use of virtualization. For each, they review key issues, demonstrate how to mitigate risks, and identify best practices. Coverage includes

·        Overcoming "anti-patterns" that slow down releases and reduce quality

·        Automating all facets of configuration management and testing

·        Implementing deployment pipelines at team and organizational levels

·        Scripting highly-effective automated build and deployment processes

·        Triggering automated processes whenever a change is made

·        Automating acceptance testing, from analysis to implementation

·        Testing capacity and other non-functional requirements

·        Utilizing continuous deployment, rollbacks, and zero-downtime releases

·        Managing infrastructure, data, components, dependencies, and versions

·        Navigating risk management, compliance, and other obstacles

Whether you're a developer, architect, tester, or manager, this book will help you move from idea to release faster than ever - so you can deliver far more value, far more rapidly.