Monday, October 1, 2012

Rapid Releases - Chatting with Sam Newman


I'm at GOTO this week and I got the chance to sit down with Sam Newman who's doing a talk on rapid releases tomorrow, which I already expected will be really good. My chat confirmed this. When I read the abstract for the talk I got quite interested, because Sam touches of something that I've spent some time thinking about too: How does the software architecture/design of our systems effect our ability to push out software quickly?

I started off asking Sam to give the elevator pitch for why everybody should go to his talk tomorrow. Paraphrasing we should go because most people - when designing systems - start off thinking about "the traditional" set qualities (scalability, availability security, performance and so on), but ignore "ease of change". Ease of change should often be an important quality attribute though, since this is a necessity for speeding up release cycle. In the talk Sam will go into some techniques, or patterns if you will, that can help you move towards making small incremental changes to your systems easily. Which is what you need to do if you want to move to a continuous delivery (or even deployment) model.

I got the impression that Sams talk supplements most of the other talks about continuous delivery, that you might hear, because most of those talks focus a lot on the build pipeline and on automating IT infrastructure, whereas his talk goes into the architecture and design of the system. This angle is important (too). In fact in Sams experience working with clients wanting to move towards continuous delivery some of the first steps most teams need to make are around the software architecture  That is, often he sees situations where there are architectural or design problems in the system that either seriously slows down the development or which hinders doing changes in small increments, which in turn hinders doing small, focused, low risk releases, which ultimately hinders releasing rapidly.

Part of the cure for this is to go into the systems and cutting them up into small well factored services. Aka (in my words) doing SOA right. I asked Sam how this related to DDD - my thinking being that these services follow bounded contexts. The response to this was pretty interesting I think: Sam agrees that these well factored services will and should follow bounded context boundaries  but points out that the way to get there is not by focusing the services around entities or even aggregates, but rather around business capabilities. I think that is a really helpful way to put it.

As I said, talking to Sam only made me more keen on going to his talk, and if any of the above resonates I'd encourage you to go too. I'm sure it'll be both fun and educational.

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