This is the deck for a [number of] talks I do on Continuous Delivery and where automation fits into each step of getting code out of a product owner's imagination and into the hands of eager users.

1. Automation & the
Deployment Pipeline
Adam Goucher
@adamgoucher
adam@element34.ca
This workshop is about the various forms of automation that happens in the Deployment Pipeline.
On this slide we talk about:
- The Going Camping Heuristic
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2. End-user Perspective
From the end-user perspective, your application just delivers its <thing> to them.
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3. Reality
We know that the reality is slightly different. But even this is well organized and logical -- if you understand the system.
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4. An Ethical Distinction
On this slide we talk about:
- Continuous Delivery vs Continuous Deployment
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5. The Lightsaber Heuristic
There are commercial tools available to do all this stuff. Instead, we’ll use all open-source tools to build a custom solution.
On this slide we talk about:
- The Lightsaber Heuristic
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6. Lots of parts, working together
To have a fully automated deployment pipeline, there are /lots/ of moving parts. The big ones are
- acceptance criteria
- configuration management
- continuous integration
- data migration
- deployment
- functional test automation
- immunization systems.
We will be talking about each of these
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7. The best way to illustrate all these things is to do them live. As a result, we will create a Ruby-on-Rails application and have push it through each
part of the Deployment Pipeline. Both the application and all the pipeline support code will be made available shortly after the workshop.

8. Specifications
It can be argued when the Pipeline really starts. So lets start from the beginning; with acceptance criteria.
On this slide we talk about:
- Specification Workshops
- Given / When / Then
I’m not a fan of any of the current BDD/ATDD tools from an automation perspective, but going through the exercise of producing the
specifications absolutely has merit.
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9. Manual Inspection
For our purposes though, the automation part begins when someone inspects their change as to whether it is time to Commit.
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10. Commit
There is one path through the pipeline and our Commit starts it.
On this slide we talk about:
- Check-in vs. Commit
- Clean vs. dirty trunk
- Pre-Commit checks
- Commit checks
- Post-Commit checks
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11. ‘Cans’
Once our code is versioned, we need to have machines to run our checks against.
On this slide we talk about:
- Machines as ‘cans’
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12. Puppet
Puppet
On this slide we talk about:
- Puppet vs. Chef vs. Cfengine
- What Configuration Management is.... and isn’t
And we provision our server, demonstrating how Puppet controls
- packages
- services
- users/groups
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13. Continuous
Integration
With a machine to run things again, we now turn our attention to the control center of the whole Pipeline; the Continuous Integration server.
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14. Jenkins
Jenkins (part one)
On this slide we talk about:
- Role of CI
- Jenkins vs. Hudson
And we configure Jenkins for our application, demonstrating
- Jobs
- Job chains
- Authentication
- Remote agents
- Reporting
- Notifications
- Plugins

15. Data Migration
Data Migration is tricky. To say the least. But getting it right is critical to getting your pipeline fully automated
On this slide we talk about:
- Up
- Down
- Idempotency
Because we’re using Ruby-on-Rails, we’ll use ActiveRecord Migrations for our pipeline but we’ll also look at dbdeploy
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16. Deployment
Compared to everything else before now, pushing the code out onto the server(s) is a snap.
On this slide we talk about:
- Zero-downtime deploys
- Rollbacks
Most ‘platforms’ have a deployment tool that has grown with it. For our deployments, we’ll be using Capistrano. Cap is not limited to just Ruby-
on-Rails deployments though so we’ll talk about how to customize it for a number of different scenarios.
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17. Functional Automation
So we’re finally at the point where we can do some ‘traditional’ automation. And since our stack is all Open Source, we’re going to use Selenium.
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18. Papers please
Uniquely identifying things on the page is one of the hardest parts about doing web automation. And is one of the main reasons scripts are
‘brittle.’
On this slide we talk about:
- attribute-based locators
- structural locators
- when to use which locator
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19. Synchronization
The other common pain point for web automation is synchronizing the script steps with the application
On this slide we talk about:
- Web 1.0
- Web 2.0
- Web 2.0++
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20. Randomness
Introducing randomness into your scripts is important -- use it!
On this slide we talk about:
- Providers
- Oracles
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21. Pesticide Paradox
Imagine you are a farmer...
On this slide we talk about:
- The Pesticide Paradox
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22. Land mine problem
You should find the mines.
Not.
Your.
Customer.
On this slide we talk about:
- The Land Mine Problem
- Continuous Delivery vs. Continuous Deployment
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23. Tags
Manual built suites of scripts is a code smell
On this slide we talk about:
- Tags
- Tag taxonomies
- Script discovery
- Parallel execution
- Random execution
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24. Page Objects
Page Objects bring the power of OO to automation
On this slide we talk about:
- Page Objects
For our project, we will construct some Page Object based Selenium scripts using RSpec. Though we can discuss and/or create examples of them
in other languages too.
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25. Jenkins (Redux)
Jenkins (again)
On this slide we talk about:
- Using Jenkins as a replacement for se-grid
- Advanced job chaining

26. Immunization
Systems
Immunizations shots keep you healthy. Immunization systems keep your deployments healthy.
On this slide we talk about:
- Immunization Systems
- Business vs. Technical metrics
- Incremental deployments
- Automated rollback
In order to ensure our deployment will not negatively impact our users, we will build a basic Immunization System for our application. By their
nature, these are highly customized per application.
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27. G-Forces
Kent Beck uses the notion of G-Forces to explain how things respond to speeding up your process. With a fully automated deployment pipeline
things will be able to go faster. And faster.
But you could also get thrown from the carousel, so be careful.
On this slide we talk about:
- Kent Beck’s G-Forces
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28. Adam Goucher
@adamgoucher
adam@element34.ca
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