Continuous Delivery story with FIFA

Recorded 7th of June 2012 at NDC in Oslo (www.ndcoslo.com)

Mirosław Jedynak - Continuous Delivery story with FIFA from NDCOslo on Vimeo.

Introduction

Continuous Delivery is the process of having a shippable product after each check-in to the source control repository. Continuous Delivery is usually implemented as a natural improvement of a Continuous Integration process. This presentation highlights challenges and presents hints on how to start from a raw environment and incrementally build a successful deployment pipeline based on Team Foundation Server (TFS), providing substantial added-value for business.

This presentation will describe the process of establishing Continuous Delivery in a project for FIFA. We describe the starting point, what we achieve in the first phases and what are the plans for further improvements in order to deliver high quality software in schedules defined by business needs – not by process and technology constraints.

FIFA project

Making Waves took over as a Services Provider for the development and maintenance of FIFA's Intranet and Extranet platform in 2011. The main challenge was to avoid long release cycles, improve quality and provide a reliable hotfix strategy for urgent issues raised in production.

The first phase of the project was focused on taking over the source code, development, test and production environments. This was a challenging task, mostly because of a lack of automation in build and deployment processes. This part of the presentation will cover possible approaches for how to incrementally create a flexible development environment, supported by a continuous integration process, in a legacy project inherited from an external part.

The goal of the second project phase was to implement a continuous delivery process in the project. I will present the main arguments for investing in tools and processes which enable more frequent and automated releases, and how that brings significant business value.

We will also cover how we implemented a set of practices and principles aimed at building, testing and releasing software faster and more frequently, including (but not limited to): deployment automation, release repository, production configuration tracking and version promotion between environments.

The presentation will briefly cover tools which were used, including Team Foundation Server (TFS), but most of the content is technology agnostic and is relevant for both developers and more-business oriented people.