Continuous Delivery

Fork in the Road

I work in a team that is constantly faced with the challenge of getting features approved for release into production. This is largely because the business is very fast moving, and business priorities change often. As priorities change, the focus of the business shifts from feature to feature, so resources for testing and approving features can be scarce. Consequently, our trunk codeline contains approved and unapproved features. This becomes a problem during our releases, because unapproved features have to be removed from trunk, which as most developers would know, is a painful process that results in dozens of conflicts.

In this blog I will present a solution to minimise the problems surrounding unapproved features in the codeline at the time of a release. This solution involves having a separate branch that only contains features that have been completed and approved by the business. I will also contrast this approach with popular alternatives like Feature Branching and Feature Toggling.

30 January, 2013 /

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Apache TomcatIn my previous post I presented the basics of sharing sessions in a cluster by storing session data in a client-side cookie. In part 2, I'll talk about the security aspects of this client-side cookie store, i.e. how to protect it from security threats.To prevent attacks specific to client-side sessions, I'll add  encryption, signing, and session timeout to the code. In addition, I'll talk about solutions to protect against security threats common to any web application, such as Session Hijacking, Session Replay, and Cross-Site Scripting. The result will be an implementation of the Session-In-Cookie pattern that allows simple and secure session-sharing in a cluster.
15 January, 2013 /

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yow2012logocitieslargeThis year was my first attendance at the YOW! Conference, and I am very happy I was able to go. The conference was well-organised with great speakers and thought-provoking presentations.Fascinating to me was that several themes recurred in different presentations at YOW!, with each speaker giving it a unique angle. Watching several presentations from different experts in this conference setting lent itself to a meta-analysis of these themes. One that I found particularly interesting is risk management for software projects; specifically, how development processes can help businesses manage the risks.
03 December, 2012 /

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The goal of this article is to discuss how improving the automated testing aspects of a continuous delivery project led to dramatic improvements in quality and delivered real business value to a leading bank in Melbourne Australia.It will cover how the automated testing was integrated into the continuous delivery process to support Scrum, to empower testers and to shorten testing cycles.
20 May, 2011 /

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