Sam Guckenheimer on Testing, Data Collection, and the State of DevOps Report – Episode 003

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This episode, Jeffrey Palermo welcomes his guest Sam Guckenheimer, to the podcast! Sam is the Product Owner for the Azure DevOps product line at Microsoft, and has been with the Microsoft team for the last 15 years. He has 30 years of experience as an architect, developer, tester, product Manager, project manager, and general manager in the software industry worldwide. His first book, Software Engineering with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System, was translated into 7 languages and recognized as a de facto guide for teams adopting Agile practices. He’s also a frequent speaker at industry conferences.

Sam explains the exciting new offer around Azure Pipelines for open source teams, changes he has seen in the industry from his many years of working at Microsoft, and some of the biggest changes in how users work with Azure DevOps. He also provides tons of key insights into the findings and research around predicting the impact Microsoft’s changes will make on user interactions, good practices around gathering live site telemetry and data collection, architectural (or design decisions or patterns) that help or hurt the live site supportability of a complex system, and key takeaways from his own internal learnings and the State of DevOps Report.

Check out this episode!

Donovan Brown on How to Use Azure DevOps Services – Episode 002

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Welcome to the second episode of The Azure DevOps Podcast — with your host, Jeffrey Palermo. Jeffrey is joined by his guest, Donovan Brown, to discuss how to use Azure DevOps services. Donovan is a Principle DevOps Manager at Microsoft, helping developers do great things with DevOps methods on the Microsoft platform. He has been with Microsoft since December of 2013, and has been a developer for 20 years.

 

This episode, Jeffrey and Donovan talk about the whirlwind it’s been since the launch of the new Azure DevOps, key information new developers might want to know when beginning to use or incorporate Azure DevOps, some of the changes to their services, what’s available for packages in DevOps, the free build capabilities Microsoft is giving to open source projects, some of the new capabilities around GitHub integration, and more!

 

Topics of Discussion:

[:52] About today’s topic and guest.

[1:02] Jeffrey welcomes Donovan to the podcast and he speaks about the name change and what it’s been like since the launch.

[4:25] Donovan shares his background in developing and his day-to-day duties at Microsoft.

[11:47] How the Team Foundation System has morphed through the phases to Azure DevOps.

[14:59] The key things new developers need to put into the various pieces (the continuous integration build, the deployment, etc)? What concepts should they think of?

[19:27] Donovan explains some of the changes to Azure DevOps services that allow you to pick and choose what you want to use.

[21:08] A word from Azure DevOps sponsor: Clear Measure.

[21:37] Donovan talks about some of the new capabilities around GitHub integration.

[24:00] What is YAML?

[27:44] How developers manage YAML.

[29:10] Donovan speaks about what’s available for Packages in DevOps.

[34:22] About the new open source pipeline listing.

[36:20] About the free build capabilities Microsoft is giving to open source projects.

[37:00] What Jeffrey and Donovan love about the free availability of Azure DevOps for open source projects.

[38:58] Donovan explains the concept of an unbreakable pipeline, its capabilities, and what makes it so exciting.

[43:30] Donovan’s suggestion for listeners to go do after listening to this week’s episode.

 

Mentioned in this Episode:

Azure DevOps

yo Team

VSTS

@DonovanBrown on Twitter

PowerShell

XAML

Clear Measure (Sponsor)

GitHub

YAML

NuGet

Dynatrace
Dynatrace’s Podcast: PurePerformance

Docs.Microsoft.com

#LoECDA on Twitter (for any questions on Azure DevOps)

Channel 9

 

Want to Learn More?

Visit AzureDevOps.Show for show notes and additional episodes

 

Follow Up with Our Guest:

Donovan Brown’s LinkedIn

@DonovanBrown on Twitter

DonovanBrown.com

Check out this episode!

Buck Hodges on the introduction to Azure DevOps Services – Episode 001

Welcome to the first edition of The Azure DevOps Podcast! Your host, Jeffrey Palermo is joined by guest, Buck Hodges, to announce the global release of Azure DevOps Services. Buck is the Director of Engineering for the Azure DevOps product group and has been at Microsoft for over 15 years.

Check out this episode!

 

Applying 4+1 Architecture Blueprints to Continuous Delivery

imageYou may just be learning about the iterative, emergent architecture method known as “4+1”.  You can read the original paper here.  Written by Philippe Kruchten in 1995, this 15-page paper lays out the views that are needed in order to communicate the architectural elements of a software system. Coursera has a good summary video in their course catalog here.

Architects in other professions go through similar thought processes as software architects, so it can be useful to borrow the graphical outputs that these other architects generate as illustrations of the decisions made while finding a solution suitable to the problem.

Continuous Delivery is an umbrella terms used to describe the process for an automated system that takes changes to the source and configuration of a system and flows those changes through a process and ultimately to a running production system while catching quality issues. Jez Humble maintains a very useful site dedicated to continuous delivery here.

I recently presented a sample 4+1 architecture to the Cloud Austin user group. Since I received several requests for the diagram, I’m posting it here. If you have any additional questions, contact me.  I’m always happy to help.  Additionally, I have a high-resolution PDF of this diagram (ARCH D in size, if you would like to print it on a plotter).

DevOps 4 1 Architecture Blueprints 200

How to incrementally adopt VSTS for devops automation

VSTS has fantastic devops-enabling features, but one of the common issues when planning to adopt it is how to plan the large migration of work and project plans from other tools.  The good news is that you don’t have to change anything about where you are tracking your work or projects in order to make use of builds, packaging, or automated deployments.  If you track your work in Jira, your code in GitHub, then you’ll want to configure VSTS like the following:

image

If my VSTS does not look like yours, you’ll want to turn on the new navigation features by selecting your profile picture in the top right corner.

image

With this configuration, you’ll be able to:

  • Configure continuous integration builds
  • Run unit tests & component-level integration tests
  • Package versioned release candidates
  • Architect release candidate packages in the onboard Nuget server
  • Create releases for a particular build
  • Map the progression of pre-production environments as well as production
  • Deploy release candidates
  • Run full-system tests against deployed instances of your builds
  • Trend statistics about your tests
  • Integrate static code analysis into your devops pipeline
  • Configure and run load tests

Many teams have systems to track projects and existing source code repositories in place.  When bringing online devops methods, it may be appropriate to focus the VSTS project on just the capabilities needed at the moment.