Continuous Delivery Patterns for Large Software Stacks

We will look at common patterns for building larger software stacks and discuss their advantages and disadvantages. We will also present a new build and promotion patterns that scales even with very large software stacks and allows you to integrate as early as possible but at the same time keep the delivery pipeline for new features flowing.

This is a critical problem for many teams. The presenter will share many stories of real life projects, how they were affected by a dysfunctional pipeline and what it took to improve their situation. There are quite a few larger projects for which a naive practice of early integration between their components lead to constant breakages and a defect delivery pipeline. Thus they were not capable to successfully build a new version of the software stack for days or even weeks. Obviously the problem of that is dramatic as no regular manual testing and capacity testing is taking place. Not only is this a massive waste of testing resources, it also leads to very long and therefore expensive feedback cycles that severely affect your time-to-market of new features. It also a likely source of conflict between the CI team and software development, as with no other means at hand, there is a desire to create stability by not adding new features or doing important refactorings.

About Hans Dockter

Hans Dockter is the founder of Gradle Inc., a company whose purpose is to empower software development teams to reach their full potential for joy, creativity, and productivity. To address his own personal frustrations as a developer, Hans co-founded the Gradle Build Tool project which was named by TechCrunch as one of the top 20 most popular OSS projects. Gradle Build Tool is now downloaded more than 23 million times a month. He then led the development of Gradle Enterprise which today is the leading enabling solution for the practice of Developer Productivity Engineering.

Previous to Gradle, Inc, Hans successfully led numerous large-scale enterprise builds and emerged as a thought leader in project automation. He is an advocate of Domain Driven Design, having taught classes and delivered presentations on this topic together with Eric Evans. Hans was also a committer for the JBoss project and founded the JBoss-IDE.

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