How to Pull an Elephant Out of a Tarpit

Stay Zvinyatskovsky and Ed Kraay provide a wonderful presentation on the challenges of continuous delivery.

They tell us how Yahoo developed the ability to deliver code on a daily or hourly basis.

Here's several concepts that stuck with me.

Must have good design. Think loosely coupled code.

Yahoo mandated that teams use continuous integration(CI). CI comes before CD.

Train managers and teams on CI, Agile, Technical Debt (how to get rid of it, not create it).

Burn the lifeboats and go for the change you need. "Change everything but your wife and children."

If we were to summarize the presentation, I'd show the following diagram that I use to train agile teams. When you combine Scrum and Extreme Programming and modular design you're in a zone. Agile's sweet spot where speed and quality exist.