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Mykola Gurov - bol.com - Continuous Delivery as a cultural shift
Recorded: 2018-11-21

Deploy continuously, move faster. But why? Why change things that work? What are the benefits for the teams and their stakeholders? Does this also apply to crucial back-end systems, or shall they rather move slow?

Meet the PUR team of bol.com. We support the Supply Chain operations of one of the the largest webshops of the Benelux. That is, the purchasing and communication with the suppliers goes via our services. Despite being mostly busy with a classical back-end "system of a record", we got our development process drastically changed over the course of a year: from infrequent releases of long-living branches we switched to the trunk-based development coupled with a high rate of deployment to production (dozens a day).

The transition was driven by the continuous improvement cycle as a response to the business and technical pressure with the given constraints. We simply aimed at reducing the cost of delivering a change.

The biggest obstacles appeared to be behavioral, not technical. Even the goal of keeping the master clean and production-ready was easier agreed than done.

As testing was quickly becoming a bottleneck, we had to rethink the way we test software and the role of our tester in this process. We shifted the weight of testing from staging environments to production and the dev/CI build. It was now the responsibility of the developer to ensure the quality of the shipped software, and the tester stopped to be a gatekeeper.

Continuous investment into the maintainability and resilience of our systems was a direct need of facilitate such changes. Extensive use of feature toggles allowed us to gain much flexibility by decoupling code deployments from feature releases.

From the business side, the commonly expected direct and simple effect of such transition — much faster delivery of the business features, wasn’t actually seen. We’ll discuss the reasons and what was the observable benefit.

Biography:
Mykola is a java backend developer (calls himself full-stack, of course). He has a strong interest in CI/CD and everything that helps to move faster without breaking too many things. Within bol.com he is known for the popularisation of using docker for system integration testing.