Team Guide to Software Releasability
Team Guide to Software Releasability
About the Book
Strong build & release engineering capabilities are key to rapid and reliable delivery of modern software systems. Learn how software releasability means not only being able to deploy faster, but also being able to quickly recover from disaster and adapt to changing technical and business challenges.
The ‘Team Guide’ collection is designed to help teams building and running software systems to be as effective as possible. Guides are curated by experienced practitioners and emphasise the need for collaboration and learning, with the team at the centre.
Bundles that include this book
About the Contributors

Manuel Pais is an independent DevOps and Delivery Consultant, focused on teams and flow.
With a diverse experience including development, build management, testing and QA, Manuel has helped large organizations in finance, legal, and manufacturing adopt test automation and continuous delivery, as well as understand DevOps from both technical and human perspectives.
Manuel is co-author of the Team Guide to Software Releasability book and lead editor for the remaining books in the Team Guide series.

Matthew Skelton is co-author of Team Topologies: organizing business and technology teams for fast flow. Recognised by TechBeacon in 2018, 2019, and 2020 as one of the top 100 people to follow in DevOps, Matthew curates the well-known DevOps team topologies patterns at devopstopologies.com. He is Head of Consulting at Conflux and specialises in Continuous Delivery, operability, and organisation dynamics for modern software systems.
Table of Contents
- Team Guides for Software
- Foreword
-
Introduction
- What is software releasability?
- What constitutes a delivery system?
- What does resilient delivery feel like?
- Warning signs of software delivery debt
- Why invest in software releasability?
- Relationship to Continuous Delivery
- What this book is (not) about
- How to use this book
- Feedback and suggestions
-
1. Treat your pipeline as a product for resiliency and fast feedback loops
- 1.1 Make your pipeline the single route to production
- 1.2 Your pipeline is now a product: invest in it
- 1.3 Avoid simply retro-fitting CD into a CI server
- 1.4 Measure delivery to visualize flow and identify bottlenecks
- 1.5 Design the delivery system to evolve with your needs
- 1.6 Apply monitoring and logging to minimize issues and downtime
- 1.7 Scale the infrastructure to avoid pipelines queuing up
- 1.8 Scale the practices and pipelines to support growing usage
- 1.9 Care for pipeline testability and usability to encourage adoption
- 1.10 Build security into and around the pipeline
- 1.11 Get started!
- 1.12 Summary
-
2. Regularly restore your delivery system to build resiliency
- 2.1 Investing in minimal recovery time pays off in engineering time
- 2.2 Store everything in version control
- 2.3 Store your pipeline definitions in source control
- 2.4 Treat your pipeline as code or configuration?
- 2.5 Repeatable Environment Provisioning
- 2.6 Rollback without (too much) pain
- 2.7 Include the delivery system in disaster recovery scenarios
- 2.8 Get started!
- 2.9 Summary
-
3. Ensure delivery system is operable to minimize downtime
- 3.1 Visibility and tracing
- 4. Ensure both practices and infrastructure can scale to meet usage growth
- 5. Care for pipeline testability and usability to encourage adoption
-
6. Measure delivery to visualize flow and identify bottlenecks
- 6.1 Plan and monitor build capacity to avoid queues
- 6.2 Build latency/throughput (?) / responsiveness
- 6.3 Monitor Code Repositories / Forensics
- 6.4 Monitor Your Builds and Environments
- 6.5 Aligning Agents with Delivery Tasks vs Generic Build Machines (it depends on cost of agent provisioning + running)
- 6.6 TODO: reference Steve Smith’s talk/book for further info
-
7. Treat your pipeline as a value stream to tackle largest bottlenecks first
- 7.1 Static (or Nearly) Value Stream Mapping
- 7.2 Dynamic Value Stream Mapping (in the Pipeline)
- 7.3 Pipeline stages, not environments
- 7.4 Single Pipeline, Single Binary
- 7.5 visualize (actual) workflow, pipeline = value stream map, identify non-technical bottlenecks, support global optimization instead of local optimization
- 7.6 Goal: Short and Wide pipelines, not long and narrow
- 7.7 Resources
- 7.8 Inclusive Pipelines
- 7.9 Choose your tools wisely - the hidden costs of “DevOps solutions” (e.g. Visual Studio)
-
8. Organize teams to promote build and release ownership
- 8.1 CDaaS
- 8.2 Clarify Build Team vs Product Team Responsibility (Build, Infra, Deploy)
- 8.3 Build Team
- 8.4 Knowledge Sharing in Product Teams
- 8.5 DVTs for Collaboration Between Product and Ops/Infra Teams
- 9. Appendix A: build security into and around the pipeline
- Terminology
-
References and further reading
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 - Treat Your Pipeline as a Product
-
About the authors
- Chris O’Dell
- Manuel Pais
- Conflux Books
About the Publisher

This book is published on Leanpub by Conflux Books
Conflux Books publishes books for the global technology community from experienced practitioners.
The Leanpub 60-day 100% Happiness Guarantee
Within 60 days of purchase you can get a 100% refund on any Leanpub purchase, in two clicks.
See full terms
80% Royalties. Earn $16 on a $20 book.
We pay 80% royalties. That's not a typo: you earn $16 on a $20 sale. If we sell 5000 non-refunded copies of your book or course for $20, you'll earn $80,000.
(Yes, some authors have already earned much more than that on Leanpub.)
In fact, authors have earned$12,307,240writing, publishing and selling on Leanpub.
Learn more about writing on Leanpub
Free Updates. DRM Free.
If you buy a Leanpub book, you get free updates for as long as the author updates the book! Many authors use Leanpub to publish their books in-progress, while they are writing them. All readers get free updates, regardless of when they bought the book or how much they paid (including free).
Most Leanpub books are available in PDF (for computers) and EPUB (for phones, tablets and Kindle). The formats that a book includes are shown at the top right corner of this page.
Finally, Leanpub books don't have any DRM copy-protection nonsense, so you can easily read them on any supported device.
Learn more about Leanpub's ebook formats and where to read them
Top Books
OpenIntro Statistics
David Diez, Christopher Barr, Mine Cetinkaya-Rundel, and OpenIntroA complete foundation for Statistics, also serving as a foundation for Data Science.
Leanpub revenue supports OpenIntro (US-based nonprofit) so we can provide free desk copies to teachers interested in using OpenIntro Statistics in the classroom and expand the project to support free textbooks in other subjects.
More resources: openintro.org.
Personal Finance
Jason AndersonThis textbook provides an in-depth analysis on personal finance that is both practical and straightforward in its approach. It has been written in such a way that the readers can gain knowledge without getting overwhelmed by the technical terms. Suitable for both beginners and advanced learners.
Getting to Know IntelliJ IDEA
Trisha Gee and Helen ScottIf we treat our IDE as a text editor, we are doing ourselves a disservice. Using a combination of tutorials and a questions-and-answers approach, Getting to Know IntelliJ IDEA will help you find ways to use IntelliJ IDEA that enable you to work comfortably and productively as a professional developer.
R Programming for Data Science
Roger D. PengThis book brings the fundamentals of R programming to you, using the same material developed as part of the industry-leading Johns Hopkins Data Science Specialization. The skills taught in this book will lay the foundation for you to begin your journey learning data science. Printed copies of this book are available through Lulu.
C++20 - The Complete Guide
Nicolai M. JosuttisAll new language and library features of C++20 (for those who know previous C++ versions).
The book presents all new language and library features of C++20. Learn how this impacts day-to-day programming, to benefit in practice, to combine new features, and to avoid all new traps.
Buy early, pay less, free updates.
Other books:
Mastering STM32 - Second Edition
Carmine NovielloWith more than 1200 microcontrollers, STM32 is probably the most complete ARM Cortex-M platform on the market. This book aims to be the most complete guide around introducing the reader to this exciting MCU portfolio from ST Microelectronics and its official CubeHAL and STM32CubeIDE development environment.
Stats One
William FooteMachine Learning Q and AI
Sebastian Raschka, PhDHave you recently completed a machine learning or deep learning course and wondered what to learn next? With 30 questions and answers on key concepts in machine learning and AI, this book provides bite-sized bits of knowledge for your journey to becoming a machine learning expert.
Ansible for DevOps
Jeff GeerlingAnsible is a simple, but powerful, server and configuration management tool. Learn to use Ansible effectively, whether you manage one server—or thousands.
Gradual Modularization for Ruby and Rails
Stephan HagemannGet yourself a new tool to manage your Rails application and your growing engineering organization! Prevent the ball-of-mud (and fix it!). Go for microservices or SOA if it makes sense not just because you don't have any other tool. Do all this through a low-overhead tool: packages. Enable better conversations to make practical changes today.
Top Bundles
- #1
Software Architecture
2 Books
"Software Architecture for Developers" is a practical and pragmatic guide to modern, lightweight software architecture, specifically aimed at developers. You'll learn:The essence of software architecture.Why the software architecture role should include coding, coaching and collaboration.The things that you really need to think about before... - #2
CCIE Service Provider Ultimate Study Bundle
2 Books
Piotr Jablonski, Lukasz Bromirski, and Nick Russo have joined forces to deliver the only CCIE Service Provider training resource you'll ever need. This bundle contains a detailed and challenging collection of workbook labs, plus an extensively detailed technical reference guide. All of us have earned the CCIE Service Provider certification... - #3
1500 QUIZ COMMENTATI (3 libri)
3 Books
Tre libri dei QUIZ MMG Commentati al prezzo di DUE! I QUIZ dei concorsi ufficiali di Medicina Generale relativi agli anni: 2000-2001-2003-2012-2013-2014-2015-2016-2017-2018-2019-2020-2021 +100 inediti Raccolti in unico bundle per aiutarvi nello studio e nella preparazione al concorso. All'interno di ogni libro i quiz sono stati suddivisi per... - #4
Pattern-Oriented Memory Forensics and Malware Detection
2 Books
This training bundle for security engineers and researchers, malware and memory forensics analysts includes two accelerated training courses for Windows memory dump analysis using WinDbg. It is also useful for technical support and escalation engineers who analyze memory dumps from complex software environments and need to check for possible... - #5
Practical FP in Scala + Functional event-driven architecture
2 Books
Practical FP in Scala (A hands-on approach) & Functional event-driven architecture, aka FEDA, (Powered by Scala 3), together as a bundle! The content of PFP in Scala is a requirement to understand FEDA so why not take advantage of this bundle!? - #7
Linux Administration Complet
4 Books
Ce lot comprend les quatre volumes du Guide Linux Administration :Linux Administration, Volume 1, Administration fondamentale : Guide pratique de préparation aux examens de certification LPIC 1, Linux Essentials, RHCSA et LFCS. Administration fondamentale. Introduction à Linux. Le Shell. Traitement du texte. Arborescence de fichiers. Sécurité... - #9
Development and Deployment of Multiplayer Online Games, Part ARCH. Architecture (Vol. I-III)
3 Books
What's the Big Idea? The idea behind this book is to summarize the body of knowledge that already exists on multiplayer games but is not available in one single place.And quite a fewof the issues discussed within this series (planned as three nine volumes ~300 pages each), while known in the industry, have not been published at all (except for... - #10
Modern C++ Collection
3 Books
Get All about Modern C++C++ Standard Library, including C++20Concurrency with Modern C++, including C++20C++20Each book has about 200 complete code examples. Updates are included. When I update one of the books, you immediately get the updated bundle. You can expect significant updates to each new C++ standard (C++23, C++26, .. ) and also...