4 Essential Ways Continuous Delivery Impacts Team Culture
By Jenny Medeiros
Diving into Continuous Delivery (CD) isn’t just about adopting new tools and processes, it also involves a major culture shift. (But in a good way.)
You’ve likely been on the brink of adopting CD after reading about all the wonders touted by practicing companies like Waze, Etsy, Target, and Netflix. While CD offers plenty of benefits for developers and can significantly step up business value, this post focuses on the major ways CD upgrades your team culture.
Encourages collaborative development
In a nutshell: team culture defines the identity and values of the company. Culture sets the tone for the entire workplace and can be a big driver as to whether employees want to come to work without secretly looking for other job openings.
An example of an unhealthy team culture is when each developer works for themselves and only focuses on the task assigned to them. They’re oblivious to business results and are essentially just a cog in a machine. (Sound familiar?)
When CD gets involved, every IT professional is forced to come together and work as a single unit. This means everyone is fully aware of the latest changes, anyone can give direct feedback, and each member has a clear vision of how their work benefits the customer (and the business).
With this setup, the team gains a true sense of community, has a better understanding of their purpose, and feels motivated to contribute to improve the organization as a whole.
Empowers teams to take ownership
Let’s go back to the “cog” developer who just does what they’re assigned and then pings the next dev in charge. This developer doesn’t feel like they own the code they just wrote. That code is nothing but a means to an end (aka. A paycheck). They’ve become complacent and lack the passion needed to create amazing software the customer will love.
Now tell that developer, “Hey, once you merge your changes into the master branch it’s being released. Oh, and today you’re in charge of release management.” Suddenly, their code (and everyone else’s code) is truly their responsibility. They’ll be much more aware of the quality of what gets merged and will view it with a clear line-of-sight of the bigger picture. As a bonus, they’ll also become aware of the release process, which nudges them to add their own ideas to improve it.
Facilitates knowledge transfer
With every developer collaborating with one another, knowledge inevitably gets transferred between them. Soon enough, everyone will know how to deploy to production instead of just sending their code off to the mysterious team who usually takes care of it twice a year.
The result is a team that is better prepared, more knowledgeable as a whole, and inclined to push each other forward with new ideas.
Teaches teams to fail fast
Elon Musk once said, “If you’re not failing, you’re not innovating enough.” This also holds true for developers.
Occasionally, builds should fail and this should be seen as perfectly acceptable. If developers are failing then they’re taking risks and making progress quickly. With CD, they’re pushed to fail fast, monitor often, and fix quickly. (It also puts systems in place to prevent those failures from reaching your customers.)
With code being delivered in small, testable chunks and a single dashboard to monitor build status, developers will learn to react to problems quickly (and not when QA finally detects them).
Moreover, this quick turnaround allows their code changes to stay fresh in their minds in the case of a roll back or a patch. Fixes are completed faster and software updates reach the user in a matter of days instead of months.
Upgrade your team culture with CD
If this all sounds like something you want to see happening at your organization, take a look at this ebook on continuous delivery using Spinnaker — the very CD software used by Waze, Target, and Netflix.
Although surely you have specific questions about how to integrate CD with your current workflow, so feel free to join the Spinnaker Slack Channel for personalized feedback.
On a final note, there’s a Spinnaker summit coming up this October set to be packed with open source experts and tech leaders from companies like Google, Netflix, Cisco, and many others. You’ll have the unique opportunity to learn how you can optimize your software management and delivery from the best in the business. Register for the event here!
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Jenny Medeiros is an engineer by degree turned writer by trade. She spent her first years working with Virtual Reality in South America before moving onto UX-focused Web Design and Development in Washington D.C. Now as a serial remote worker, she partners with tech-savvy companies to create content that helps people and computers understand each other better. In her spare time, she hangs with Netflix and often asks Alexa how to fold a fitted sheet.
