Scaling the Build Process at Home Depot
Speaker: Matt McKenny & Jeff Millimek
For more posts from Spring One 2017, see the Spring One blog table of contents
- Previously had regimented build process – had to be Java on Tomcat with Eclipse.
- Now can use almost anything.
- Shift to culture of expermentation
- Focus on speed and feedback
- Opinionated about not having an opinion
Tools
- Need to change tools/stack as learn
- Used to have one Enterprise Jenkins for everyone. People wanted different plugins so became special snowflakes.
- With Cloud can get new Concourse CI cloud server in 8 minutes vs ticket and waiting
- Provide example pipelines – search and replace example repo with team one and good to go [isn’t this a lot of repetition?]
- Slack – easier to discuss with remote people – communication and info sharing. Worked with managers to make sure everyone had a certain amount of time to spend on slack.
- In person, use stickies
For publicly traded companies
- track actuals of labor or average over a period of time
- SOX – move away from waterfall tollgate and build new change management approach with pipelines
Lessons learned
- No single owner of how do CI. Need to include developers. Everyone be part of the conversation. Less likely for everyone to standup own thing.
- At scale, individual choices harder. Allow for common path and then iterate on snowflakes.
- Free/cheap on demand servers
- Secure social collaboration
- Work with teams who want to change
- 300+ concourse servers. Also have Jenkins, Drone, TeamCity