Continuous Delivery Served up in Boston and New York

I’m always interested in what motivates people. What makes them change, improve, and innovate? I had an opportunity to attend both the Jenkins User Conference in Boston and the CloudBees Continuous Delivery Summit in New York City, both of which were sponsored by Serena and both of which were filled to capacity. There were a lot of motivated attendees, and I had an opportunity to speak with many of them.

All of them were interested in ways to transform their current way of building and delivering software using the patterns and practices of Continuous Delivery.  Everyone knows that their current method is broken and that “small, agile and fast” beats “big, hairy and slow,” hands down. You could sense the urgency to address challenges with the deployment pipeline.

What struck me was the diversity of company types, sizes, industries and maturity levels. I spoke with companies that were building RFID services in the cloud for large retailers, companies trying to improve quality and cycle times for the production of embedded software in medical devices and companies struggling with constructing deployment pipelines for mobile and cloud environments. There was lots of discussion around where to start, how to deal with legacy applications and infrastructures and what tools to use. Improving quality and reducing cycle times by automating the deployment pipeline was the main topic for both days.

In New York, Forrester analyst Kurt Bittner opened up the CD Summit with a compelling presentation on the “Business of Continuous Delivery.” Kurt shared some very interesting insights, calling Continuous Delivery “Agile 3.0” and stating that CD is the engine that enables businesses to obtain a competitive advantage by allowing them to handle a high rate of change. Maximizing throughput minimizes wait and waste and increases innovation rate, which Kurt defined as the percentage of application development spending focused on new capabilities vs. maintenance of existing capabilities.

The two events were also great places to roll out our new deployment automation software free trial. We encouraged those Jenkins users looking to extend their DevOps toolchains with deployment automation to check out Serena Release Automation, and we expect to see a lot of downloads in the coming days.

Continuous Delivery is already reshaping how software is being delivered. We have the successful  “DevOps unicorns” as today’s examples but expect to see a lot more big enterprises telling their success stories soon. As William Gibson said (and mentioned by Kurt in his presentation): “The Future is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed.”

How far along are you in your Continuous Delivery journey? Leave a comment and let me know.

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