Anders Wallgren on Coursera: Continuous Delivery, Testing and Deployment

Our CTO, Anders Wallgren, recently sat down with Alex Cowan from the University of Virginia School of Business for a Coursera interview series. Coursera is an educational platform that partners with top universities and organizations around the world to offer online courses in a range of disciplines. As part of Coursera's "Drive to Value with Agile Methods " specialization, Anders provides his insights on the benefits of Continuous Delivery, how to get started, and some tips on unit testing, testing UI, functional testing and deployment automation. Some takeaways from Anders’ interviews in the series include:

• How Continuous Delivery creates value by increasing efficiencies in the delivery pipeline and teams

• How CD is essentially a process optimization problem, and how to get started on your journey to adopt Continuous Delivery

• The importance of testing code behavior vs. testing the physical code

• Why experimentation and making mistakes when starting out with Continuous Delivery is beneficial

• The importance of understanding release processes and cultivating a quality pipeline to ensure deployment success

Watch the free videos:

For more on the benefits of Continuous Delivery and best practices for testing and deployment, watch the full (and free!) - short videos below, and also check out the other video chapters in the courses of this specialization.

Anders Wallgren on the Advantages of Continuous Delivery

“Part of what continuous delivery focuses on is ‘Let's optimize the delivery chain.’ Let's really look for where are we creating value, and let's get really good at those parts of the chain where we create value. And those parts of the chain where we're not creating value, let's not do those, or let’s make those optional or in parallel.”

Anders Wallgren on Getting Started

“You don't leave on Friday and come back Monday and all of the sudden you do Continuous Delivery. This requires making mistakes. This requires trying out new things. And that will take time.”

Anders Wallgren on Unit Testing

“If you touch a piece of code, write some tests for it or do what some people call boundary testing. If there's a kind of a natural API boundary or a service layer boundary, then do some testing around that.”

Anders Wallgren on Testing UI

“What we find teams doing that are really good at this is, first of all, don't do it as a UI test if you don't have to. If you're testing API functionality, if you're testing back-end functionality, drive that at a lower level.”

Anders Wallgren on Functional Testing

“I think a lot of times you get into a behavior when you've written your test to test the code, not to test the intended behavior of the code. And a typical syndrome of that is if you can't touch a single line of code without breaking half a dozen tests, your unit tests are probably a little too brutal.”

Anders Wallgren on Deployment

“What good organizations do is really focus on every time they have something that escapes the corral, they figure out, how could they have caught that earlier in the process? Was there a unit test missing? Are they just not doing the right thing? Or do they need to do more security scan? And good organizations cultivate the quality of the pipeline and make sure that it's evolving.” If you would like to learn more about Continuous Delivery, Agile, DevOps, and other modern software delivery trends, make sure to join us every other Tuesday at 10 a.m. PT for our free video podcast, Continuous Discussions (#c9d9). Every episode features a panel of industry experts discussing the latest developments and topics in the software industry. Join us on Tuesday, June 14, 2016 for the next #c9d9 on DevOps and CD for Non-Web Applications .