Agile practices are gaining influence within diverse companies worldwide, yet not without a cultural and technological tension between delivery teams and various groups within their organizations.
This tension is partly born of a natural instinct to reject new ideas, but more importantly due to a disbelief that these practices will live up to their claim of delivering business value at a faster rate with better quality.
Although this book is not entirely focused on project management per se, it does lay the foundation for the success of modern product development by creating the case for Continuous Build, Integration, Delivery, and Deployment solutions.
Continuous practices help ensure that the software is being compiled and tested properly and is always in a deployable state, not only on the developer's workstation. Continuous integration will ensure that the different subsystems function correctly according to the expectations set in code and by the business. Continuous delivery ensures that the artefacts created in the previous steps can be reused and deployed to higher environments to showcase the product to its stakeholders, whereas continuous deployment pushes these artefacts to production for quick assessment of a hypothesis.
Creating a delivery pipeline is at the core of our ability to develop business value with a cadence that is desired by product owners. This is achieved thanks to something we never had the luxury of having previously: the ability to fail fast because we could not hope for anything better than being able to quickly test a hypothesis by deploying it, assessing its impact, and reverting or pivoting when misguided or misinformed about our market conditions.
Producing software in this manner cannot be achieved without automation. This provides a safety net for developers as they adapt or refactor code; it scales the regression test cases as the product evolves and grows and, perhaps as importantly, describes and executes server provisioning, configuration, and the deployment of its applications.
A product's success is based on fast feedback, whether good or bad, and this book details the practical ways of using Jenkins, its plugins, and ecosystem to assure fast feedback for architects, developers, testers, the product's stakeholders, and by extension, its customers.
It is therefore essential to master the pipeline architecture and automation in order to give businesses the tools that shorten the time between concept to cash, in addition to creating low-ceremony deployments as part of the standard software development lifecycle.
Taken holistically, this book will not only teach you about deployment pipelines using Jenkins, but will also prepare you for the cultural change to DevOps, which will improve your product development methods even further.
Itamar Hassin
Thought Leader and Project Lead, ThoughtWorks