Building Incremental Assurances: Alleviating Uncertainty Through Incremental Change

It is said that a journey of a thousand miles must begin with a first step.

Regardless of whether you inherited a legacy project or created one with a stringent time crunch, every developer has encountered delivery uncertainty. Delivery uncertainty happens when you can’t explain with confidence what the source code does, don’t know if the project covers all scenarios and edge cases, whether what you have is deployable, or when you’re not certain that a deployment won’t negatively impact operations.

In fact, delivery uncertainty is a pretty abysmal way to live life as a developer, but you might not have the time or luxury to fix the whole project in one go. Fortunately, combating delivery uncertainty does not have to happen overnight. It can occur through small, consistent, iterative gains. Come with us as we explore an example of how iteratively integrating certain practices into a project can gradually build incremental assurances.

In this engaging talk, we'll explore the transformative power of incorporating manual/unit/integration testing with mock data, revealing tangible benefits such as verifying source code functionality, streamlining code cleanup, and minimizing documentation overhead. Building on this foundation, we'll delve into the integration of these practices with a continuous integration (CI) pipeline, presenting it as an automated error detection layer that safeguards against new issues and aids in preemptive issue identification through static code analysis tools, code compilation, and various testing methodologies. Furthermore, we'll discuss the implementation of continuous deployment (CD) to automate project deployment, resulting in robust builds, dependable QA environments, and accelerated, consistent releases. By seamlessly integrating these iterative processes, developers gain delivery certainty, empowering them to focus on innovation and new projects.