One of the goals of my new team at LinkedIn is building a brand new platform for front end engineers so that they can deploy new features to production 3 times a day. However, we don't want to just "enable" other teams to deploy to prod daily. We want to automatically deploy. Always.
This is what I find critical in continuous delivery mind shift. Enabling (through automation) to go to production frequently is not enough. A team might be enabled to deploy to prod easily and automatically. However, only when the deployment is regular and automatic (for example: triggered on every push master - like in Mockito) then the change of team's habits, thinking and behavior truly begins. Team that is enabled to continuously deliver differs so much from the team that continuously delivers. At least, this those are my subjective observations :)
I chatted about it with Peter Niederweiser, the legendary creator of spock test framework. Spock is not continuously deployed at time of writing this post (this will change, right Peter!!!?? :). Publication of new Spock versions is more interesting than Mockito because the former needs to deal with groovy variants (compile, build and run against different groovy runtime, publish artifact variants, etc.). Given the complexity of the build process there is a temptation to automate everything to the point when all artifacts, documentation, release notes can be published via a one click. I'd say it's not enough. Enabling for continuous delivery is simply not as gratifying as doing it all the way through.
It's hard to explain what changes when the team does true continuous delivery. The attitude to a code commit is different. Commit messages get better. Tests are cleaner and deeper, more thoughtful. There is more vigor in battling flaky tests (fact of life: continous delivery == lots of tests == flaky tests). There is more energy to improve the automation even further. To make the automated release notes look better. So on, so on.
I'm on a mission to do continuous and automatic delivery and not merely enable it. I hope I managed to stir you up a bit, too :) Right now I'm lonely at Munich airport waiting for a connecting flight to Krakow. In a week, I'm moving my family over to Santa Clara CA. I got pretty agitated writing this post, hopefully the content makes sense. Keep in mind that it's my subjective experience.
