Kristan Vingrys from Thoughtworks: An Agile build pipeline

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Another presenter that I was able to speak with at last week’s STAREAST conference in Orlando was Kristan Vingrys from Thoughtworks. Vingrys is the Global Test Practice Lead for ThoughtWorks. In his session titled, “The Agile Build Pipeline: A Tester’s Lessons Learned,” he describes the experience of Insurance Australia Group as they launched a new complex service requiring early integration and strong testing capabilities.

The project called for continuous integration and a build pipeline that allowed for production deployment on the same day the code changes were made with a high degree of confidence that there would be no regression bugs.

I was reminded of my conversation with Thoughtworks Studio’s Jez Humble last summer about continuous delivery and the difference between continuous delivery and continuous deployment.

As both Vingrys and Humble point out, it’s the customer’s decision about whether or not to flip the switch to deploy to production, but having an automated build process that allows for quick delivery can certainly be a benefit to the business.