(A talk given at PIPELINE Conference – March 2017 – In Praise Of Slow (Continuous Delivery) – https://pipelineconf.info/2017-event/speakers/)

“Can you adopt Continuous Delivery in the world of packaged enterprise software? What if software delivery is a pull model rather than push? You have 1000s of users all moving at their own pace? This talk will explore the practices of Continuous Delivery for quarterly, rather than daily, releases.

Most discussions of Continuous Delivery make the assumption that updates can be pushed out directly to consumers, or that everyone uses the same software-as-a-service based user interface which can be updated once for everyone. What about the cases where those things aren’t true? Where users pull a new version of the software when they choose to do so rather than when you ship it. What does continuous delivery mean in the realm of packaged enterprise software?

This talk will touch on:

* The role of versioning when shipping packaged software
* How to test the permutation explosion that results from different users on different versions
* The importance to behind-the-firewall analytics, and the issues with collecting such data
* Social pressure, marketing and evangelism as a means to speed up delivery to end users
* How to roll out and test new features when versions of your product have a long half-life
* Some real-life stories of success and failure and suggestions for others starting down this path

The main take away from this talk will be that the practices of Continuous Delivery are still relevant and useful even when continuous is actually quite a lot slower.”

Gareth Rushgrove is a senior software engineer at Puppet. He works remotely from Cambridge, UK, building interesting tools for people to better manage infrastructure. Previously he worked for the UK Government Digital Service focused on infrastructure, operations and information security. When not working he can be found writing the Devops Weekly newsletter or hacking on software in new-fangled programming languages.