The Art of Agile Development, 2nd Edition

Zero Friction

AUDIENCE

Programmers, Operations

When we’re ready to code, nothing gets in our way.

Imagine you’ve just started working with a new team. One of your new teammates, Pedro, walks you over to a development workstation.

“Since you’re new, we’ll start by deploying a small change,” he says, sitting down next to you. “This machine is brand new, so we’ll have to set it up from scratch. First, clone the repo.” He tells you the command. “Now, run the build script.”

Commands start scrolling up the screen. “We use a tool for reproducible builds,” Pedro explains. “It’s detected that you don’t have anything installed, so it’s installing the IDE, development tools, and images needed to develop and run the system locally.”

“This will take a while,” he continues. “After the first run, though, it’s instantaneous. It updates again only when we commit changes to the config. Come on, I’ll show you around the office.”

When you come back, the build is done. “Okay, let me show you the app,” Pedro says. “Type rundev to start it up.” Once again, information starts scrolling by. “This is all running locally,” Pedro explains proudly. “We used to have a shared test environment, and we were constantly stepping on each other’s toes. Now that’s all in the past. It even knows which services to restart depending on which files you change.”

Pedro walks you through the application. “Now, let’s make a change. Run watch quick. It will build and test the files we change.”

You follow his instructions ...