Tag: agile

A Continuous Delivery reading list

Post author By anderssv
Post date January 14, 2025
No Comments on A Continuous Delivery reading list

Over time I have worked a lot with continuous delivery and tried to explain why it is such an important concept. When I was asked for a reading list, I was left without a clear answer. So this is an attempt at creating one. 📚

I have some writing that I might do around these concepts, but this list is it for now. Check back later, I will update this when I have something. 😊 Let me know if you have any feedback or questions.

The list

Types: 📗 = Book, 🌐 = Website, 📈 = Report, 📝 = Blog, 🎬 = Video, 🎧 = Podcast

Why:
- 📈 The latest DORA accelerate report always has some interesting insights. 2024 especially had some insights around AI.
- 📗 Accelerate; the original DORA book. Explaining everything in depth
- 📗 The original book from Jez Humble and Dave Farley: Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation
- 🎬 In Continuous Delivery Simply Explained, Dave Farley takes us through the basics as well as why it matters.
- 📗 Team Topologies helps us understand how different teams can interface and align to create flow and great software.
- 📗 Dave Farley has written a lot of good stuff. He has shared excellent insights especially in Modern Software Engineering: Doing What Works to Build Better Software Faster.
- 📝 SPACE and DORA
- 📝 Slow deployments causes meetings by Kent Beck 😉
Techniques:
- 📝 All about pull requests and the dysfunctions that accompany them.
- 📝 And if you decide to move away from pull requests you should probably be going From Async Code Reviews to Co-Creation Patterns an article from Dragan Stepanović.
- 📝 To manage risk when going into production often you should to use feature toggles by Pete Hodgson on Martin Fowlers website.
- 📗 Refactoring to change your system in a controlled manner is essential. Kent Beck and Martin Fowler wrote the original and Michael C. Feathers followed up on how to work in a legacy codebase.
- 📗 Automated testing is essential, and I would argue you get a lot further with TDD. Regardless of whether you do test first or after, you can learn a lot from Kent Becks’ Test Driven Development: By Example.
- 📝 When you deliver multiple times a day you can’t have bugs occurring all the time. In Bugs Optional? Kent Beck describes the effect continuous delivery can have on bugs. It also describes how building a culture for delivering requires few bugs.
- 📝 Real Options: Making small changes to production all the time supercharges your learning process. I have always appreciated how it pushes us to keep options open for later. Chris Matts and Olav Maassen has written about real options.
- 📝 I think Observability is usually the least explored part of Continuous Delivery but also essential when speed increases. If you want to explore you can read about 📝 the three pillars of observability and how you should focus on results by moving 📝 Beyond the 3 Pillars of Observability.
- If you would like to dig even deeper into observability have a look at 📗 read Honeycombs’ Observability book. Thanks to Erlend Wiig for pointing it out to me.
- And I really like the defaults in 🌐 New Relic APM (with an agent). I recommend testing that to see how easy it can be to get deep insights into your application.
Some general resources that I generally appreciate for this:
- Dave Farley has some good 🎬 videos and interviews on Youtube as well as a podcast series. 🎧 This podcast episode comes highly recommended.
- 📝 Kent Beck has always been a great inspiration and he writes a lot on Substack. Well worth the read even though it is less about continuous delivery explicitly.
- 🌐 Martin Fowler is another one of the great ones. His website contains a lot of articles about software development, and here is his tag about continuous delivery.
- 🌐 eXtreme Programming is considered by many to the be essence of agile and continuous delivery.

There’s of course a lot of related topics that I take for granted. Things like DevOps, Infrastructure as Code, Build Pipelines and Continuous Integration are essential but not mentioned. You can easily find a lot about them online.

Let me know if I should include anything else. I would love to learn something new as well. 🙂

Thanks to Terje Heen and Asgaut Mjølne for contributing with input and content. Also a bit of AI. 😊 Gemini and Claude are my favourites.

Tags agile, continuous delivery, reading list

Development

XP2010

Post author By anderssv
Post date June 8, 2010
3 Comments on XP2010

So last week I was lucky enough to attend XP2010 in Trondheim. It was an intense week with great people and great content. It’s kind of hard to process all this content, but it’s time to try.

After listening to the excellent advice of Ole Christian I attended the workshop of Chris Matts on Feature Injection . It was absolutely one of my best sessions at XP2010 and it turned out to be really relevant to what I’m doing at my current client. I think I’ll be able to use a lot of this when it comes to working with the requirements and really understanding what matters.

After an intense workshop it’s always good to listen to Mary Poppendieck talk about Lean in a nutshell . I’ve heard or read a lot of her stuff before, but she has a really unique way of explaining and selling her point of view. I always learn a lot from listening to her.

Ole Ellnestam and Daniel Brolund rounded off the day in a nice way with Mikado refactoring . It’s an interesting and structured way of doing large refactorings. I’ve done something similar with rolling back changes when I get stuck, but this is a nice structured way to approach it. Now if only my computer hadn’t been acting up I would actually be able to practice it a bit more.

The second day started out with a bang, first with a keynote by Scott Page, then listening to Cory Foy talk about craftsmanship. Head over to the program page of XP2010 to see the videos. It’s really worth the time. While you’re there also check out the talks by Mary Poppendieck and Marcus Ahnve.

Now I must admit that most of thursday was lost to my nerves, as I was holding two lightning talks that day. Of the ones I saw and really liked was the talk of Jonas Follesø about the Blackbox Recorder . This sparked quite an interest in the Java crowd, so some started the Java version: Jackbox Recorder . Sadly one of my talks was at the same time as the My Agile Suitcase Pecha Kucha, so I didn’t get to see it. I heard great things about it. Luckily there’s video out.

On the last day, conference fatigue were setting in. But I got a great session of Coding Katas. Interesting to both see other languages and other people code. I really also liked the workshop Cory Foy gave on innovation games. It opened my eyes on how to do facilitation around requirements and features, and tied quite nicely into the stuff from the first day with Feature Injection.

Well, this is just a try at writing down what I remember and process some of the information. I know it’s summary, just let me know if there’s something I should expand ont.

It was really a great conference, like none I’ve attended before. Thank you to all the brilliant people that I met and the organizers.

Tags agile, conference, lean, presentation

Development

Smidig 2009 and my talk

Smidig 2009, Norways very own Agile conference was held on October 22nd and 23rd. I have attended it earlier, and this year I was one of the organizers. The entire experience has been excellent, though a lot of work. Others were working a lot more than me, and I reall have to give them credit for beeing such a positive and active crowd.

Tandberg did an excellent effort of providing us with the video equipment, and enabled us to make the videos available. Even though sometechnical difficulties resulted in loosing some talks (mine included), they did an excellent job, and a big thank you to them.

I held a talk on agile deployment (again), due to some last minute cancellations.

Because my talk was lost I decided to put some details here on how you could get the material if you are interested. So:

Slides on slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/anderssv/smidig-utrulling-at-smidig-2009
A longer version I held with video at JavaZone 2009: http://tcs.java.no/tcs/?id=2E72A3F8-CD11-4C5C-A29A-63EB3E95149F

My own company, Capgemini had 7 talks, which was a really good effort. To see other videos (Norwegian only) go to http://tcs.java.no .

Tags agile, deployment, Java, smidig2009, talk