Glossary
3 minute read
- Continuous Delivery
- Continuous Deployment
- Continuous Integration
- Hard Dependency
- Soft Dependency
- Story Points
- Toil
- Unplanned Work
- Vertical Sliced Story
- WIP
Continuous Delivery
The ability to deliver the latest changes to production on demand.
Continuous Deployment
Delivering the latest changes to production as they occur.
Continuous Integration
Continuous integration requires that every time somebody commits any change, the entire application is built and a comprehensive set of automated tests is run against it. Crucially, if the build or test process fails, the development team stops whatever they are doing and fixes the problem immediately. The goal of continuous integration is that the software is in a working state all the time.
Continuous integration is a practice, not a tool. It requires a degree of commitment and discipline from your development team. You need everyone to check in small incremental changes frequently to mainline and agree that the highest priority task on the project is to fix any change that breaks the application. If people don’t adopt the discipline necessary for it to work, your attempts at continuous integration will not lead to the improvement in quality that you hope for.
– “Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation.” - Jez Humble & David Farley
You can find recommended practices for CI at MimimumCD.org
Hard Dependency
A hard dependency is something that must be in place before a feature is delivered. In most cases, a hard dependency can be converted to a soft dependency with feature flags.
Soft Dependency
A soft dependency is something that must be in place before a feature can be fully functional, but does not block the delivery of code.
Story Points
A measure of the relative complexity of delivering a story. Historically, 1 story point was 1 “ideal day”. An ideal day is a day where there are no distractions, the code is flowing, and we aren’t waiting on anything. No such day exists. :wink:
There are many common story point dysfunctions: pointing defects, unplanned work, and spikes are some of the more common. Adjusting points after work is done is another common mistake. The need for story points is a good indication that we do not understand the work. If we have decomposed the work correctly, everything should be 1 point.
Toil
The repetitive, predictable, constant stream of tasks related to maintaining an application.
SRE Workbook: Eliminating Toil
Unplanned Work
Any work that the team inserts before the current planned work. Critical defects and “walk up” requests are unplanned work. It’s important that the team track all unplanned work and the reason so that steps can be taken by the team to reduce the future impact.
Vertical Sliced Story
A story should represent a response to a request that can be deployed independently of other stories. It should be aligned across the tech stack so that no other story needs to be deployed in concert to make the function work.
Examples:
- Submitting a search term and returning results.
- Requesting user information from a service and receiving a response.
WIP
Work in progress is any work that has been started but not delivered to the end-user