Project Moonshot - Our Path to Continuous Delivery
In 1961, John F Kennedy announced the seemingly impossible task of sending a man to the moon.
At the time of the announcement, NASA had never even sent a human into orbit.
The technology to send someone to the moon did not exist.
As Kennedy said “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills; because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win.”
A corporate moonshot, as defined by Astro Teller, head of Google X, is a 10x improvement. A 10x improvement can’t be achieved by working harder. It involves creating a clean slate. It involves thinking differently.
At our product and technology all-hands on Friday, I announced that Social Tables Engineering needs to take our own corporate moonshot.
The goal of Project Moonshot is to enable multiple, fully automated, fully tested releases a day, similar to Facebook, Etsy and others by end of year.
Every pull request (PR) will be its own release.
Unlike sending someone to the moon, we know the general steps to get to continuous delivery, but in order to get there, we will have to change everything:
- Different way of branching (trunk-based development and Github flow)
- Different way of testing (full test automation — unit, integration, and ui testing)
- Different way to determine definition of done (ephemeral qa environments for each PR)
- Different way of releasing (canary releases)
Getting there won’t be easy. It will require focus, hard work and will require a lot of change.
Succeeding at our moonshot will result in an extremely efficient release process that will get features in the hands of customers rapidly with high quality.
I’m incredibly excited about this project.
We plan to document our progress along the way.
If you are interested in learning more about Social Tables, or helping us on our journey, then please reach out.
