Session

A Layered Approach to Progressive Delivery: Build Your Way to Faster, Safer, Smarter Releases

Progressive Delivery is the practice of decoupling deploy from release, allowing changes to be safely pushed all the way to production and verified there *before* releasing to users. Selectively dialing up and down the exposure of code in production without a new deploy, rollback, or hotfix is the foundation of Progressive Delivery, but the higher-level benefits of safety and fast feedback come from layering practices on top of that.

Key Takeaways:
Whether you are new to Progressive Delivery or are already practicing some aspect of it, you'll learn/refresh on the basics and then come away with a powerful model for layering higher-value benefits on top of that foundation:

-> Decouple Deploy from Release
o Incremental Feature Development
o Testing In Production
o Kill Switch (big red button instead of hotfixes and rollbacks)

-> Automate Guardrails/Do No Harm Metrics
o Alert on Exception / Performance (early in rollout)
o “Limit The Blast Radius” (without manual heroics)

-> Measure Release Impact
o Boost Team Pride
o Avoid the Feature Factory Trap

-> Test To Learn (A/B Testing)
o Taking Bigger Risks Safely
o Learning Faster With Less Waste (painted door experiments, dynamic config)

Dave Karow

Build software faster without breaking things. Test what works (user behavior vs your opinion).

Redwood City, California, United States

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