Build Quality In
Build Quality In
Continuous Delivery and DevOps Experience Reports
About the Book
Build Quality In
Build Quality In is a book of Continuous Delivery and DevOps experience reports from the wild.
The interdependent disciplines of Continuous Delivery and DevOps are of immense value to an organisation, but they are hard. We have seen Continuous Delivery and DevOps work in the wild, as have other practitioners. We want to help people on their own Continuous Delivery and DevOps journey, by sharing the experiences of those who have done it – what worked, what didn’t, and the highs and lows of trying to build quality into an organisation.
Contributors
We have an incredible group of Continuous Delivery and DevOps practitioners, who have freely shared their own first-hand experiences in this area.
- Alex Wilson and Benji Weber
- Amy Phillips
- Anna Shipman
- Chris O’ Dell
- James Betteley
- Jan-Joost Bouwman
- Jennifer Smith
- John Clapham
- Marc Cluet
- Martin Jackson
- Matthew Skelton
- Niek Bartholomeus
- Phil Wills and Simon Hildrew
- Rachel Laycock
- Rob Lambert and Lyndsay Prewer
- Sriram Narayanan
- Steve Smith
Thanks to all our contributors!
Steve Smith and Matthew Skelton
Forewords
The Continuous Delivery foreword is written by Dave Farley. Dave Farley is co-author of the Jolt award winning book Continuous Delivery. He has been having fun with computers for over 30 years. Over that period he has worked on most types of software. He has a wide range of experience leading the development of complex software in teams, large and small. 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. More recently Dave has worked in the field of low latency computing developing high performance software for the finance industry. Dave currently works for KCG Ltd.
The DevOps foreword is written by Patrick Debois. Patrick Debois is a developer, manager, sysadmin, and tester. He first presented concepts on Agile Infrastructure at Agile 2008 in Toronto, and in 2009 he organized the first DevOpsDays . Since then he has been promoting the notion of ‘devops’ to exchange ideas between these groups and show how they can help each other to achieve better results in business.
Code Club
We are donating 70% of author royalties to Code Club – a not-for-profit organisation that runs a UK-wide network of free volunteer-led after-school coding clubs for children aged 9-11. We passionately believe that diversity within the IT industry must improve, and efforts must start in our schools. A purchase of our book at $20.00 will yield a donation of $12.26 and a purchase at $25.00 will yield a donation of $15.40.
Thank you for buying Build Quality In. As well as providing a range of in-depth Continuous Delivery and DevOps stories, your purchase will contribute to children learning to code and general skills such as problem solving and collaboration regardless of their gender or ethnicity.
About the Contributors

Doing the DevOps thing




Chris has been developing software with Microsoft technologies for nearly fourteen years. She currently works at Monzo helping to build the future of banking.
She has led teams delivering highly available Web APIs, distributed systems and cloud based services. She has also led teams developing internal build and deployment tooling using the unconventional mix of .Net codebases onto AWS infrastructure.
Chris promotes practices we know as Continuous Delivery, including TDD, version control, and Continuous Integration.

Niek Bartholomeus is a DevOps and Continuous Delivery evangelist who has implemented a Continuous Delivery pipeline during his most recent mission at ReQtest, a small agile company. Before that he was a technical architect at a large financial institution where he was responsible for bringing together the dev and ops teams, on a cultural as well as a tooling level. He currently works as a DevOps consultant for BMC. He has a background as a software architect and developer and is fascinated by finding the big picture out of the smaller pieces.

Continuous Delivery Consultant, Thoughtworks




Process Owner Service Operations and Service Transition



Systems Architect / Integrator / DevOps / Hacker

Jennifer Smith is a Software Consultant for ThoughtWorks Australia. She originally got into software development through the coincidence of mandatory C++ classes that formed part of her Music Technology degree. She equally accidentally became interested world of infrastructure and operations worked ‘cos you gotta get software out somehow! Grudgingly this has translated into actually enjoying learning more about infrastructure and understanding how to keep things running in production.

Rob Lambert has been lucky enough to be part of some amazingly forward thinking companies. It lead to a rich understanding of how businesses succeed, but more importantly for Rob's life, a deep understanding of how to remain relevant and employable in ever changing markets.
Rob teaches communication skills, how to be an amazing manager and how to remain employable in our changing world. He loves to teach and engage audiences through writing, podcasting and public presentations.
He's a family man with three kids which keep him busy, but when he's not working, he's writing content. The thread that runs through it all is about constant change and personal growth. You'll see this in his books.
Rob lives in Winchester, England with his family. He's also a keen photographer, podcaster and car enthusiast.
He owns the Cultivated Management and Parent Brain brands.


Lyndsay is an Agile Delivery Lead, currently working for Equal Experts. He’s passionate about helping how people, teams and organisations deliver IT solutions.

Freelance Linux and Virtualization Consultant
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Contributors
- Donation to Code Club
-
Continuous Delivery Foreword - Dave Farley
- About Dave
-
DevOps Foreword - Patrick Debois
- About Patrick Debois
-
Learning to dance to a faster rhythm - Chris O’Dell
- The opening sonata
- The slow adagio
- The dance of the minuet
- The closing sonata
- About the contributor
-
DevOps-ifying a traditional enterprise - Niek Bartholomeus
- Introduction
- Organisation structure
- Problems
- Tactical solution: enhancing the existing communication flows
- Structural solution: decentralisation
- Summary
- About the contributor
-
A testing transition from yearly to weekly releases - Rob Lambert and Lyndsay Prewer
- The problem
- Our vision
- Who does the testing?
- What approaches do we use?
- The deployment process
- Feedback loops
- Challenges
- The future
- About the contributors
-
Delivering Continuous Delivery, continuously - Phil Wills and Simon Hildrew
- Why deploy so frequently?
- How did we make it a reality?
- RiffRaff, a tool for simple deployment
- Monitoring and alerting
- Why not Continuous Deployment?
- Roles and responsibilities
- About the contributors
-
Making the world a better place - Marc Cluet
- Context
- High level DevOps
- Is it all about ‘the Cloud’?
- Introducing DevOps
- Teaching an old dog new tricks
- In Conclusion
- About the contributor
-
Staying Xtremely Unruly through Growth - Alex Wilson and Benji Weber
- Introduction
- Testing in Production
- Co-ordinating Shared Infrastructure
- Making things visible
- Services/Versioning
- Delivering major design changes incrementally
- Conclusion
- About the contributors
-
We need two DevOps resources, please - Anna Shipman
- Introduction
- How we built a DevOps culture at GDS
- GDS and the GOV.UK website
- Our DevOps culture
- The challenges we’ve faced
- What can someone reading this take back to their organisation?
- Coda
- About the contributor
-
Process kick - Amy Phillips
- Needing a change
- Making the change
- Seeing Progress
- Dealing with uncertainty
- Keeping the Peace
- Did it work?
- About the contributor
-
Scrum for Ops teams - James Betteley
- About the contributor
-
DevOps in the mix - John Clapham
- Introduction
- An Unsustainable Pace
- A Pause For Thought
- First steps
- Momentum
- A Tipping Point
- Reflections
- About the contributor
-
You write it, you support it - Jennifer Smith
- Understanding infrastructure
- Feedback loops
- Feedback loops from running systems
- Shortening the feedback loop: “You write it, you support it”
- Collaboration
- Trying this yourself
- Credits
- About the contributor
-
Continuous Delivery across Time Zones and Cultures - Sriram Narayanan
- Introduction
- The Origin of the Build and Release Team
- Taking stock
- Performant environments and reduced functional test times
- Network issues, bandwidth issues, and network latencies
- Reducing build times
- Providing predictable environments
- Improving test predictability and stabilizing tests
- Monitoring builds
- Antipatterns
- The pipeline structure
- Lessons we learned for effective Continuous Delivery
- Remaining challenges
- Build and Release, or Infrastructure Engineering?
- About the contributor
-
DevOps in an Enterprise environment - Jan-Joost Bouwman
- Introduction
- The process organisation
- Starting the journey
- Ambitions for the future and problems we are facing
- About the contributor
-
Trust, configuration management, and other white lies - Martin Jackson
- How do you do Continuous Delivery and DevOps within the UK Government?
- How can trust be weakened in CD and DevOps in general?
- How have we established trust within the UK Government?
- Conclusion
- Song title references
- About the contributor
-
Avoiding the pendulum swing - Rachel Laycock
- Context
- Conway’s Law
- No more dependencies!
- 5 years passed later
- Modularise all the things!
- Death by autonomy
- Stop the pendulum swing!
- Parting thoughts
- About the contributor
-
Communicate to collaborate - Matthew Skelton
- Context
- Problems and causes: mental and financial models, execution, and communication
- Treat the build system as production
- Improving the software release process
- Fostering communication, collaboration, and trust
- Raising awareness within teams and across the organisation
- Results
- Lessons learnt
- About the contributor
-
34 days - Steve Smith
- Introduction
- Year 1
- Year 2
- Year 3
- Reflection
- About the contributor
-
Contributor Q & A
- How did you get involved in Continuous Delivery / DevOps?
- What do you see as the biggest advantage of Continuous Delivery / DevOps?
- What do you see as the biggest challenge in Continuous Delivery / DevOps?
- Version History
- Publisher details
- Notes
Causes Supported

Code Club
https://www.codeclub.org.ukA nationwide network of volunteer-led after school coding clubs for children aged 9-11.
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