Continuous Delivery : Is there a problem with the sales pitch?

 

I saw Simon Haslam point to this very short video of Charity Majors speaking about Continuous Delivery.

This answer to why companies are not using continuous delivery is perfect!

“It’s a failure of will, and a failure of courage on the part of our technical leadership.”

I love this answer, because this is exactly how I feel about it!

After seeing that, it got me thinking about why technical leadership are so disengaged from continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD), and I started to wonder if it was actually a problem with the sales pitch.

Have you ever been in a discussion where you provide compelling evidence for your stance, then say one stupid thing, which allows people with the opposing view to jump all over you, and effectively ignore all the stuff you said previously? Been there! Done that! I wonder if the same thing is happening during the CI/CD sales pitch.

When people write or speak about this stuff, they will often bring up things that provide an instant get-out for people. Let’s imagine I am trying to convince someone that CD is the way forward. I might say things like,

  • Automation means it’s not dependent on a specific person being there to complete the deployment.
  • We can eliminate human error from the delivery process.
  • It makes delivery more reliable, as we have a well tested and proven process.
  • That proven reliability makes both us and our customers more confident that deployments will be successful, so it reduces the fear, uncertainty and doubt that often surround deployments.
  • As a result of all of the above, it makes the delivery process quicker and more efficient.

That all sounds great, and surely seals the deal, but then we hit them with this.

  • Amazon does 23,000 production deployments a day!

And now you’ve lost your audience. The room of people who are scared of change, and will look for any reason to justify their stagnation, will likely go through this thought process.

  • Amazon use CI/CD to get 23,000 production deployments a day.
  • We don’t need to do 23,000 production deployments a day.
  • Therefore we don’t need CI/CD.

I know this sounds stupid, but I’m convinced it happens.

I’ve read a bunch of stuff over the years and I’m invested in this subject, but I still find myself irritated by some of the things I read because they focus on the end result, rather than the core values that got them to that end result. Statements like, “Amazon does 23,000 production deployments a day” or “this is what Twitter does”, are unhelpful to say the least. I feel like the core values should be consistent between companies, even if the end result is very different.

This is just a thought and I could be talking complete crap, but I’m going to try and declutter myself of all this hype bullshit and try to focus on the core values of stuff, and hopefully stop giving people a reason to ignore me…

Cheers

Tim…

Author: Tim...

DBA, Developer, Author, Trainer.