When practising Continuous Delivery, it’s important that your application is deployable at all times. This can introduce some challenges, especially when you have features that span multiple builds, or bug fixes that need to get into production quickly.
Digital service delivery
Preparing your team for Continuous Delivery
It can be challenging to get sufficient infrastructure set up to enable you to practice Continuous Delivery, but the biggest challenge may be changing the way you (and your team) think about releasing software.
What is Continuous Delivery?
In today’s world of instant communication, businesses need to be able to move quickly to meet the ever changing needs of their customers, especially so when it comes to building, maintaining and evolving the online platforms of those businesses.
Planning an Agile backlog
Most Agile methodologies work in small independent units of work, often called User Stories. Coming up with these is its own challenge, and one I plan to tackle in a future post. Today though, I want to discuss how to determine if a User Story is valuable, and from there I’ll outline a method for turning a list of disparate stories into a working backlog for commencing an Agile project.
Introduction to Agile and Scrum
Over the past five years, Agile has gained significant traction and has been adopted by organisations of all shapes and sizes.
Migrations, seeds and pipelines
Most applications you write rely on certain data stored in a database that is essential for it to work. That data defines your business logic as much as the code. That data should be represented in code. In this post I’ll discuss how we handle migrations and seed data through our Continuous Delivery pipeline at Made.
The Benefits of Continuous Delivery
Continuous Delivery is a technique that grew roots in the IT department, but is very much focused on delivering value, in the shape of shipped software, back to the business more frequently and more reliably.
3 Ways to Reduce Page Load Times on Your E-Commerce Website
As Benjamin Franklin once said, time is money, and for an e-commerce website every millisecond counts. Page speed is a common sticking point for most solutions out there, so in this article I’m going to describe 3 practical ways you can decrease your page load time.
Canary Releases
Continuous Delivery is an approach to software delivery which promotes small incremental releases rather than huge iterations. Every push to master which passes its test suite is considered to be production ready, and as a result our deployment pipeline is optimised to get it out to production websites as quickly as possible, without sacrificing security and safety. This benefits us as developers and our customers in the same ways. New features and bug fixes are deployed rapidly, and code is safer by virtue of having smaller changes. How much can you break in a day or two? We are all spared the anxiety of large, lengthy deploys where weeks of work can be released to production at once.
Testing without QA
We have an almost continual dialogue on how to improve the quality of the software that we’re involved in delivering. One of the conscious decisions that we’ve made is that we don’t make use of a dedicated QA or test role.