The Technical Heart of Agile

If you think that agile software development is about short iterations and standup meetings – think again. The technical heart of agile is the ability to develop Known Good Stuff. That means that you know at any time that what has been done so far actually works – and will continue to work correctly all the way through integration, acceptance testing, and in actual use. By taming the integration monster you tame the complexity monster as well.

At the heart of successful agile development, we always find short end-to-end feedback loops that guarantee quality and fitness-for-use as code is being written. It is wasteful and irresponsible to develop software with hidden defects that will only show themselves later, or with features that are useless – or worse, annoying – for customers.

This talk is about Continuous Delivery: what it means, what it takes to make it work, and why it is essential to good software engineering today – even, or especially, for large systems. It covers a lot of ground, from automation and aggressive testing to DevOps and deployment strategies.