(A talk given at PIPELINE Conference – March 2017 – Chasing the rainbow – getting to Continuous Delivery from a standing start – https://pipelineconf.info/2017-event/speakers/)

“This talk will cover the journey I went on with my team and the things we learned along the way. When we took on the system there were no tests, it couldn’t be built in house, our environments were hand crafted snowflakes and each production release was a fraught episode which often ran late into the night when it didn’t go as planned. The journey was made harder as the system was also managing and taking data from a fleet of state-full IoT devices in homes.

Just focussing on build, test and deploy and not delivering features was not an option, for a small company we had to keep delivering features to stay alive. This talk will cover what we discovered, sometimes the hard way, what we focussed on and how we negotiated with the business to balance feature delivery with improving how we could deliver. Over two years we went from manual error prone two monthly releases of a monolith to a fully automated build and test pipeline which allowed us to release business value into production multiple times a week, stress free, with automated rollback. As our delivery became more agile, we started to see our relentless focus on continuous improvement change how the whole company prioritised work and features.”

Andy is a technical team lead at Dyson, helping to expand its IoT platform for the next generation of connected products. He has been leading connected product development teams for over 12 years, in roles ranging from development to test and product ownership. Andy is an evangelist for lean software development, Continuous Delivery and its application to the often waterfall world of connected product development.