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

“Continuous Delivery is hard. The breadth and depth of recommended technology and organisational improvements, the smorgasbord of available tools, and the specific circumstances and constraints of your organisation create a huge challenge. Difficult decisions must be made, every single day:

– Should we try to improve stability or speed next?
– What improvement in stability or speed should we aim for?
– Which changes should we try to make that improvement?

These decisions occur in uncertain conditions, and if you make a mistake you can easily lose the alignment between individuals, teams and departments you need for continuous delivery to be successful.

We can reduce uncertainty and make better decisions by measuring the stability and speed of the release process, the build process and the codebase. These indicators of continuous delivery provide quantitative data on the impact of your changes, and pinpoint where the conversations need to happen so you can learn what’s working and what isn’t.

In this session, I will show how measuring stability and speed can power a successful adoption of continuous delivery in an organisation of any size. This is a deep dive into the latest thinking on continuous delivery, backed up by long-term case studies in private and public sector organisations”

Steve Smith is a Continuous Delivery consultant at Always Agile Consulting Ltd. He has been helping organisations adopt Continuous Delivery since 2007, and has overseen large-scale transformation programmes for up to 60 teams at a time. Steve is the author of “Measuring Continuous Delivery”, a co-author of “Build Quality In”, and a co-organiser of the annual PIPELINE conference.

Steve is stepping in on behalf of Dave Farley, who unfortunately cannot attend due to illness.