Crossing the CI/CD/DevOps Chasm
Speaker: Miranda LeBlanc (Liberty Mutual)

Goals

• Cloud native enterprise – continuous delivery of valuable software
• Embrace DevOps – culture of trust, safety and confidence
• Agile
• Microservices architecture

Working with services/teams

• Operate in an open source fashion
• Can submit pull requests to other teams
• Liberty CloudForge – internal tooling team to support business facing teams.

Security

• Need to protect medical and financial data
• Build safety, security and compliance into pipeline

Goals vs Reality

• Developers focused on own team/business units.
• Not ready to do open source like development.
• Not ready to look at chasm let alone cross it.

Approach

• Started experimenting with tools and standing up CI.
• Then progressed to static analysis/code review.
• Then DevOps and automated deployments
• Then PaaS
• Then to Prod in 5 minutes

MVP

• Focus on MVP on every feature/story
• Minimal feature is a proof of concept
• Want MVP that will delight customers

Challenges

• Removing features that aren’t delivering value (or not delivering value anymore)
• Growth – going from 10-50 people. Everyone can’t know everything.

Lessons Learned

• CI/CD requires real software engineering skill – learning Maven/Gradle, automated testing, etc.
• Define key metrics up front and use them – ex: released a bug to prod because focused on unit test coverage
• Culture and behaviors matter – ex: get whole team on board with new wait of thinking. Want to avoid asking what date trying to hit. Roadmaps are for conversations not commitments.