Continuous Delivery and the Theory of Constraints

GOTO Amsterdam 2019

How should you actually implement Continuous Delivery?

Adopting Continuous Delivery takes time. You have a long list of technology and organisational changes to consider. You have to work within the unique circumstances of your organisation. You're constantly surrounded by strange problems, half-baked theories, off the shelf solutions that just don't work, and people telling you they've worked here for 23 years and Amazon is nothing to worry about.

How do you identify and remove the major impediments in your build, testing, and operational activities? How do you avoid spending weeks, months, or years on far-reaching changes that ultimately have no impact on your time to market?

The Theory of Constraints is a management paradigm that describes how to improve throughput in a homogeneous workflow. It can be applied to Continuous Delivery in order to locate, prioritise, and reduce constrained activities until a flow of release candidates to production is achieved.

In this talk, Steve Smith will explain how easy it is for a Continuous Delivery programme to be unsuccessful, how the Theory Of Constraints works, how to apply the Five Focussing Steps to Continuous Delivery, and how to home in on the constrained activities that are your keys to success. It includes tales of glorious failures and ignominious successes when adopting Continuous Delivery.

What will the audience learn from this talk?

• Continuous Delivery means applying technology and organisational changes to the unique circumstances of an organisation
• If a Continuous Delivery programme does not focus on the activities with the most rework and/or queue times, there is a high probability of sub-optimal outcomes
• The Theory Of Constraints is a management paradigm for improving organisational throughput, while simultaneously decreasing both inventory and operating expense.
• The Theory Of Constraints can be applied to Continuous Delivery, as the build, testing, and operational activities in a technology value stream should be homogeneous
• The Five Focussing Steps can be used to identify constrained activities, and then introduce the necessary technology and organisational changes to reduce rework and/or queue times

Does it feature code examples and/or live coding?
No

Prerequisite attendee experience level:
Level 300