Not every continuous delivery (CD) initiative starts with someone saying “Drop everything. We’re going to do DevOps.” Sometimes, you have to grow your process incrementally. And sometimes you don’t set out to grow at all—you are just fixing problems with your process, trying to make things better. Gene Gotimer discusses techniques and the chain of tools he has used to bring a DevOps mindset and CD practices into a legacy environment. Gene discusses how his team started fixing problems and making process improvements in development. From there, they tackled one problem after another, each time making the release a little better and a little less risky. They incrementally brought their practices through other environments until the project was confidently delivering working and tested releases every two weeks. Gene shares their journey and the tools they used to build quality into the product, the releases, and the release process.
Gene Gotimer
Gene Gotimer is a senior architect at Coveros, Inc., a software company that uses agile methods to accelerate the delivery of secure, reliable software. As a consultant, Gene works with his customers build software better, faster, and more securely by introducing agile development and DevOps practices such as continuous integration, repeatable builds, unit testing, automated functional testing, analysis tools, security scanning, and automated deploys. He has successfully brought these techniques into commercial and government clients, including the US Department of Defense. Gene feels strongly the repeatability, quality, and security are all strongly intertwined; each of them is dependent on the other two, which just makes DevOps that much more crucial to software development.