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A review by rodhilton
Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases Through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation by Jez Humble, David Farley
5.0
Continuous Delivery is a book that every agile team who wants to advance together should read. It is a handbook for every possible angle about delivering software continuously.
A team must first learn how to be agile. Estimating, planning, working together, following good engineering practices - these are tough adjustments for completely chaotic teams. But once a team feels like it has embraced agile, this is the exact book they should all read to make their software development cycle pain-free.
The book covers everything related to continually delivering working software: how to version control configuration, how to create a codebase that deploys identically to all possible environments, differing only by the config used for deployment, continuous integration, how to use a CI server to create a deployment pipeline, how to write good automated tests, how to write good automated ACCEPTANCE tests, pitfalls and challenges you might encounter while adopting Continuous Delivery practices, automating deployments, testing performance and security, manual testing, environment management, data management and migration strategies, version control, branching/merging, software componentization and dependency management, and a lot more.
If this seems like an awful lot to cover in a single book, it's because it is. The book is DENSE: absolutely packed with information. It's insight to word ratio is simply staggering. The only downside is that the book was written both to be read cover to cover as well as read piecemeal, which leads to repetition of information in some places. Since I read it cover to cover, this got mildly annoying, but it was pretty minor.
I was part of a team that was trying to adopt continuous delivery for the better part of two years. The book was not out at the time, and there were a lot of missteps and mistakes along the way. Our team learned a LOT of hard lessons about what works and what doesn't work to enable delivering software continually, and it was stunning to me just how much the book repeated, almost word-for-word, lessons that we learned in the process about the right way to do things. I know from first-hand experience that the advice offered in the book is rock-solid. I also know that the end-state, actually delivering working software through completely non-stressful deployments is a heavenly situation in which to work.
If your team is already agile and wants to take their delivery to the next level, I cannot possibly recommend this book highly enough. It's phenomenal.
A team must first learn how to be agile. Estimating, planning, working together, following good engineering practices - these are tough adjustments for completely chaotic teams. But once a team feels like it has embraced agile, this is the exact book they should all read to make their software development cycle pain-free.
The book covers everything related to continually delivering working software: how to version control configuration, how to create a codebase that deploys identically to all possible environments, differing only by the config used for deployment, continuous integration, how to use a CI server to create a deployment pipeline, how to write good automated tests, how to write good automated ACCEPTANCE tests, pitfalls and challenges you might encounter while adopting Continuous Delivery practices, automating deployments, testing performance and security, manual testing, environment management, data management and migration strategies, version control, branching/merging, software componentization and dependency management, and a lot more.
If this seems like an awful lot to cover in a single book, it's because it is. The book is DENSE: absolutely packed with information. It's insight to word ratio is simply staggering. The only downside is that the book was written both to be read cover to cover as well as read piecemeal, which leads to repetition of information in some places. Since I read it cover to cover, this got mildly annoying, but it was pretty minor.
I was part of a team that was trying to adopt continuous delivery for the better part of two years. The book was not out at the time, and there were a lot of missteps and mistakes along the way. Our team learned a LOT of hard lessons about what works and what doesn't work to enable delivering software continually, and it was stunning to me just how much the book repeated, almost word-for-word, lessons that we learned in the process about the right way to do things. I know from first-hand experience that the advice offered in the book is rock-solid. I also know that the end-state, actually delivering working software through completely non-stressful deployments is a heavenly situation in which to work.
If your team is already agile and wants to take their delivery to the next level, I cannot possibly recommend this book highly enough. It's phenomenal.