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• Case study of a company's software engineering practices with Siemens Healthcare as an example |
• Discussion of the impact of delays or errors on end-users and strategies for mitigating downtime |
• Introduction to Dave Farley's YouTube channel "Continuous Delivery" and its purpose. |
• Importance of experimentation and learning in software engineering |
• Value of focusing on skills and techniques over prescriptive methodologies |
• Dave Farley's YouTube channel as a resource for software engineering insights and experiences |
• Benefits of continuous integration (CI) and single-branch development |
• Inspirations from companies like SpaceX and Tesla, particularly their approach to innovation and experimentation |
• Personal preferences and opinions on various software engineering topics |
• Importance of minimizing time between code changes |
• Value of finding simple explanations for complex ideas |
• Inspiration from Martin Thompson on embracing imperfection and continuous improvement |
• Recommendation to check out David's YouTube channel |
• Discussion wrap-up and appreciation for the conversation |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I remember how difficult it used to be to get code into production. FTP used to be used a lot, rsync used to be a thing, getting thing out there... And something happened around 2010. There starts to be a shift in 2012/2013; there was an acceleration of just git pushing, and the code would get out the... |
I think you, Dave, had something to do with this, because around 2012 you published this book, you co-authored this book with Jez Humble, which was called "Continuous Delivery." |
**Dave Farley:** Yeah. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** \[04:04\] And even though, hand on heart, I haven't read the book, but everything that you capture in that book I sure have practiced for more than decades, and I cannot think of working any different. So how did you come up with the concept of continuous delivery? |
**Dave Farley:** I'll start off by admitting that I'm very old and I've been doing this for a long time... So mostly how I came up with this is by doing it wrong in lots of weird and interesting ways first, and finding out what didn't work. I had a kind of formative experience, several formative experiences... But one ... |
Later on I worked on a project for a points-of-sale system when I worked for ThoughtWorks in the early 2000's... And we were doing extreme programming at some scale; at the time we thought that it was probably the biggest agile project in the world. There were about 200 people working on this agile project on three dif... |
So we started to get more disciplined in our approach, we started seeing the things that were going wrong, and we started to introduce more of the deployment automation, more of the configuration management infrastructure as code, better approaches to automated testing, and starting to formulate basic deployment pipeli... |
The book itself came out of a notion -- there were a bunch of us doing different things on different projects in ThoughtWorks, and we thought that we were on to something. We were starting to see patterns that worked, and we were starting to apply those to the project, so we would go in having a better sense of what to... |
So we thought we'd kind of write a book that was initially meant to be a series of essays, and there were a bunch of us that said "Yeah, we've got some stuff to say" and started talking about it... Actually, when it came down to it, only Jez and I did any writing, so that's why we ended up writing the book. \[laughs\] ... |
I think you put it perfectly when you were describing it in terms of we wanna give ourselves the freedom to make mistakes. We want to be able to start -- I am a popular science nerd. I love reading about science, and physics in particular, and I think that we can learn a lot from the fundamental philosophies of science... |
\[08:41\] One of the things that I am obsessed with at the moment is watching Elon Musk and SpaceX build starships to go to Mars and blowing them up in Texas, because that's how you learn. That's how you do great engineering. I think we're on to something here, because I think continuous delivery is an approach that al... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** You've made so many great points that I have difficulty tracking all the things that I wanna mention to all your points... I mean, there's just so much, so let me start with this. First of all, thank you very much. You have no idea how big of an impact your approach and your teachings and sharings had... |
For example, I was also into physics when I was in high school, and I was convinced that I'll go to university to study physics. But then, when I was at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, there was the "100 Years for Max Planck" talk. That was a fascinating conference. But I discovered the Macintosh. And that cha... |
So I was so good at making mistakes and learning from them, and deploying, and figuring out what doesn't work, that people said "Can you do my website? Can you host my thing? Oh, how do I do emails? I don't know how to do emails." This was like the early 2000's. That's when I started doing these things properly. And I ... |
**Dave Farley:** Absolutely. That's one of the things that I've observed. First of all, thank you for saying thank you; that's very kind. But I've had the privilege of working with some great teams over the years, and I have yet to see one that has adopted continuous delivery in the way that I would recognize it that e... |
One of my other formative experiences was I was involved in building a very high-performance financial exchange, while I was in the middle of writing the continuous delivery book... And that was an exercise in genuine engineering. We were doing some really hard stuff, some really difficult stuff to be able to build thi... |
One of my friends is now in New Zealand, and he regularly grumbles to me that "If only we were doing those things..." People don't wanna go back to a different way of working. This stuff works better. And fascinatingly, we're gathering data to back those sorts of statements up for science nerds like you and I. You shou... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** \[12:07\] I love that. Starting from "I'm wrong. Let me figure out what right looks like." |
**Dave Farley:** Yes. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** And if you always assume that you're wrong, even with all your experience and everything you know, you will never be wrong - that's very weird, because you will figure what right is. You don't know what right is. It changes all the time. It's contextual. And most importantly, it's the people that you ... |
**Dave Farley:** Yes, certainly. And I think that's certainly the difficult problem. We're technologists, so we often get lured by the technology, and your joy of discovering the Macintosh and all that kind of stuff... But the hard parts -- I know it's trite, but it is true that the hard parts are the people parts. It'... |
One of my proudest boasts is that in the organization that I've just mentioned, where we've built the exchange - it was an organization called LMAX. It still exists, still trading, still running these exchanges around the world built on our technology, and the culture is still fantastic. Funnily enough, I saw a job adv... |
It is difficult to get people thinking differently, to change their minds, to jump out of the ruts of their old habits and jump into a new way of thinking about things, which these days is a lot of the thing that I get pleasure from, is trying to help people just think about ideas differently. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So would you say that the people influence these practices and the people contribute to how these practices work, or is the inverse true, where the practices influence the people to behave in a certain way, and then sustain these practices long-term? |
**Dave Farley:** I think it's both. I think it's a combination. I think it's a little bit too trite... So we've always said things like "What it takes to build great software is you need great development teams." And that's true, you need good people. But it's not enough. I've worked with some genuinely brilliant devel... |
\[16:14\] But you could say the same kind of thing about science. Science is this terrific endeavor, a human activity carried out by fallible, mistaking human beings... But by organizing their thinking in a certain way, they eliminate whole classes of errors and biases that are built into us through our biology. And if... |
One silly example, one of my good friends who I worked at LMAX with - he was the CTO, I was the head of software development - is Martin Thompson, and I regard Martin as at least one of the best, probably the best programmer that I've ever met. He's genuinely brilliant. Really, really talented guy. And I've known him f... |
There are some of these techniques that however good you are or however bad you are can improve you. And if we were to be able to identify something that we could class as an engineering discipline, then I think it would have that kind of property, which is really what I'm talking about. I think we are odd in software ... |
I think words have some power, and I think that I like to use a reasonably strict definitional approach to parsing things to be able to form ideas... And if we think of engineering in the terms of the practical application of science, then it ought to work for software at least as much as it does for anything else. And... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** First of all, I really like that you point out this distinction between engineers, software engineers and developers, because it's a very important distinction. People don't even think about it, and they use the terms interchangeably... But they mean very different things. Now, I think we can have a s... |
**Dave Farley:** Yeah. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Software developers or engineers? |
**Dave Farley:** Both. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay, great. So being Martin is the best software craftsman, software person, TDD made him better. Before TDD, what made him so good, in your eyes? |
**Dave Farley:** \[20:01\] There were lots of things. He's a very smart guy, which helps. It's not enough, but it helps. One of Martin's great talents is he's got a laser beam focus on simplicity. And one of the things that I learned from developing software with Martin is I've really strengthened one of the tools in m... |
Martin's code is almost like reading prose. It's readable, it's modular, it's cohesive... It's just nice code. It's also blisteringly fast. Martin's one of the world's experts on high-performance and concurrent systems, and he's widely recognized as such. The people on the Java team occasionally ask him for advice abou... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I can definitely see how the TDD would have enhanced that property or that aspect, because it forces you to focus. |
**Dave Farley:** Yes. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I mean, you could be focused or not as you write code, but when you write TDD, if you do it properly, if you start with red, which is always the first one... Do it Red, go Green, then refactor. You even have a video on this; we'll introduce this a bit later, but that's fascinating to see how simple it... |
Okay, that was a very nice story. Thank you for that. |
**Dave Farley:** It's a pleasure. |
**Break:** \[23:17\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Now as we come back, I would like to dig a little bit into the technology that you used back in the day, so the specifics around the CI system, the CD system, the programming language, the frameworks, how that used to work, if you had any project tracking tools, or how you would organize work in the d... |
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