Application Quality Gates in Continuous Delivery: Deliver Better Software Faster!

Editor's Notes

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2. This is a deployment that shouldnt make it to production. Two metrics from WPO (Web Performance Optimization) that should have been seen in dev & test before releasing this to prod
3. Another deployment that didnt go that well. Bad SQL when specifying a too long timerange for that report, DEBUG logging turned on and an outdated buggy log4j library!
4. Who can we avoid this? Lets just do it like the „Unicorns“ in that space – such as Etsy, Google or Facebook?
5. Several companies changed their way they develop and deploy software over the years. Here are some examples (numbers from 2011 – 2014) Cars: from 2 deployments to 700 Flicks: 10+ per Day Etsy: lets every new employee on their first day of employment make a code change and push it through the pipeline in production: THAT’S the right approach towards required culture change Amazon: every 11.6s Remember: these are very small changes – which is also a key goal of continuous delivery. The smaller the change the easier it is to deploy, the less risk it has, the easier it is to test and the easier is it to take it out in case it has a problem.
6. The problem is though – when you blindly copy what you read you may end up with a very ugly copy of a Unicorn. Its not about copying everything or thinking that you have to release as frequently as the Unicorns. It is about changing and adapting a lot of their best practices but doing it in a way that makes sense to you. For you it might be enough to release once a month or once week.
7. So – our goal is to deploy new features faster to get it in front of our paying end users or employees
8. For many companies that tried this it may also meant that they fail faster
9. Your app that you are responsible for crashes …
10. The Fifa World Cup App one week before the worldcup. Crashed for the majority of Android users when refreshing the news section of the app caused by a memory leak introduced by an outdated library they used
11. I love metrics – and I think we should make decisions on deployments based on key metrics. But also monitor deployments in production to learn whether the deployment was really good
12. Synthetic Availability Monitoring -> Clearly something went wrong
13. Even if the deployment seemed good because all features work and response time is the same as before. If your resource consumption goes up like this the deployment is NOT GOOD. As you are now paying a lot of money for that extra compute power
14. Got a marketing campaign? If you roll it out do it smart: Start with a small number – monitor user behavior – fix errors if there are any before rolling out the rest of the campaign
15. A lot of people dont look at these metrics and just add new code on an ever growing big pile of technical debt
16. Based on a recent study: 80% of Dev Team overall is spent in Bugfixing instead of building new cool features $60B annual costs of bad software instead of investing it in new cool features to spearhead competition
17. Yes – we are focusing on quality TOO LATE
18. When its too late we end up here
19. We need to leave that status quo. And there are two numbers that tell us that it is not as hard to do as it may seem
20. Based on my experience 80% of the problems are only caused by 20% problem patterns. And focusing on 20% of potential problems that take away 80% of the pain is a very good starting point
21. Sounds super nice on paper – so – how do we get there?
22. Marketing had a great idea: 20x20 grid showing the last 400 selfie uploads. Implementation was pushed through quick resulting in an overloaded page that causes both performance and usability issue on the mobile device as well as on the servers and CDNs
23. This was a monolithic app for searching sports club websites. The executed sample search brought 33 sports club. Before this app was „migrated“ to Microservices everything was in a single monolith taking about 1s to execute. After the „migration“ to (micro)services the same call takes 26.7s including 33 calls to the new microservice and 171 roundtrips to the database
24. Pushing the unit test to the mobile device to test for GPS specific calcuation issues. Then identifying which devices have a GPS calculation bug!
25. Monitoring impact of 3rd party APIs such as Facebook
26. Overloaded Kia website brings it down during superbowl
27. Kia is doing something different: they have a special „bare minimum static optimized“ website for the spike period -> thats smart
28. So – we have seen a lot of metrics. The goal now is that you start with one metric. Pick a single metric and take it back to your engineering team (Dev, Test, Ops and Business). Sit down and agree on what this metric means for everyone, how to measure it and also how to report it Also remember that for most of these use cases discussed and metrics derived from it we only need a single user test. Even though we can identify performance, scalability and architectural issues – in most cases we don’t need a load test. Single user tests or unit tests are good enough
29. Here is how we do this. In addition to looking at functional and unit test results which only tell us how functionality is we also look into these backed metrics for every test. With that we can immediately identify whether code changes result in any performance, scalability or architectural regressions. Knowing this allows us to stop that build early
30. This is how this can look like in a real life example. Analyzing Key Performance, Scalability and Architectural Metrics for every single test
31. So – our goal is to deploy new features faster to get it in front of our paying end users or employees