Category Archives: Automation

Automating Database Deployments: Worthwhile and Supported by Tools

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I get to present UrbanDeploy a few times a week and the part of the demo that always draws questions is when I deploy database upgrades. Why is this spooky magic while application deployments are expected?

Basically, database deployments are hard. Unlike most applications, you can’t simply replace the old version with the new. The changes are incremental, they impact data, and they need the blessing of mystics (DBAs). While hard, database deployments are automated by many teams. They treat database changes like code, and use widely available tools to help them with the migrations.

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True Benefit of Deployment Automation

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With more and more companies looking into automation solutions it’s only natural that the debate of risk vs. reward enters the discussion. Recently I’ve heard the question, “What are the true benefits of automating deployments?” Most people would argue that automation will:

· Help avoid human errors that can occur when deploying manually.

· Lower the amount of time a deployment takes.

· Give folks back their weekend

These are all undoubtedly true when implementing deployment automation, but at the end of the day they are simply components of a greater advantage. The true benefit of automating deployments is enhanced business efficiency, effectiveness, and capability. In other words, when automated, deployment enables growth and change rather than existing as a bottleneck to advancement. Continue reading →

Want a big impact? Start small

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In an enterprise environment patience and small victories are key, when introducing automation into software deployment. This week, I had a conversation with a release manager that reinforced what I know about large organizations. Big change is hard to drive quickly because organizational inertia is so great. Look for little victories in areas the company is ready to take a risk on, and use that to become a trusted provider of a good service to the rest of the company.

The release manager explained in detail two of their most difficult deployments one of which took around 55 hours to complete, the other had multiple issues due to required changes made in the QA environment not being captured and were subsequently over looked when the application was deployed to production, and both deployments had 40 employees on hand to complete. Continue reading →

Webinar: Release Management Best Practices — Balancing Agility and Control

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Tomorrow (Wednesday Sept 9th) at 2 pm EDT / 11 am PDT Maciej Zawadzki and Damon Poole are going to be talking about Release Management Best Practices: Balancing Agility and Compliance.

The origin of this talk is the conflict we see in development organizations between the people who are trying hard to go faster, and the people who are trying hard to stay in control. There seems to be a fundamental tension between speed and safety… but in practice this is a false dichotomy. Automating manual tasks is a huge win both for time saved and for process enforced, for both Agility and auditing.

If you’d like to hear more you should Register Now and the join us Wednesday.

Q&A From the Beyond Agile Processes – A Lean ALM Strategy Webinar

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We recently cohosted a Webinar on Lean processes with our friends from AccuRev. Analysts from Forrester discussed trends in the market, and how companies are applying Lean principals to find efficiencies in their development and release efforts. The webinar was fantastic and we had more questions than we could get to live. Here are some of the questions that came back in to us that we wanted to answer or expand on.

Q: Setting up all that automation seems pretty intimidating when in the throes of projects.  How much setup time is usually required for a standard .Net/Windows environment?

A: Automating does require effort. However, usually when the team has a little while to breath it can dedicate someone to automate the parts of their process that are the most wasteful. Once that’s done, the time that was spent on those processes, can be fed back into the automation loop to build out a robust system. Usually teams can get some benefit back after a couple weeks (sometimes a couple hours) that can start this cycle. Continue reading →