Preface
We are in the 2020s and research has shown us for more than 10 years that companies with high developer performance not only outperform their competitors in velocity and throughput, they also score higher in quality, innovation, security, employee satisfaction, and most importantly, customer satisfaction.
And yet, besides some unicorn companies, the majority of traditional businesses struggle to transform themselves. Established rigid structures and slow processes, monolithic application architectures, and long release cycles for traditional products make it hard for companies to change.
This, however, is not a new phenomenon. Transformational changes are always hard and take many years to succeed, if the companies do succeed at all. The probability of failure is also very high. This is because transformation has to happen on so many levels – and if these changes are not aligned, the transformation is bound to fail. This book will help you with your transformation - not only by providing the research for high developer performance but also by providing practical examples on how you can accelerate your software delivery.
This book is a practical guide to DevOps. It helps teams that are already on their DevOps journey to further advance into DevOps and speed up their software delivery performance by providing simple solutions to common problems. It will help teams find the right metrics to measure their success and learn from other success stories without just copying what these teams have done themselves. The book uses GitHub as the DevOps platform and shows how you can leverage the power of GitHub for collaboration, lean management, and secure and fast software delivery.
By the end of this book, readers will understand what influences software delivery performance and how they can measure delivery capabilities. They will therefore realize where they stand and how they can move forward in their journey with transparency and simple solutions for cross-team collaboration. Equipped with simple solutions for common problems, they will understand how they can leverage the power of GitHub to accelerate: by making work visible with GitHub Projects, measuring right metrics with GitHub Insights, using solid and proven engineering practices with GitHub Actions and Advanced Security, and moving to an event-based and loosely coupled software architecture.
Who this book is for
This book is for developers, solution architects, DevOps engineers, and SREs, as well as for engineering or product managers who want to enhance software delivery performance. They may be new to DevOps or already have experience but struggle to achieve maximum performance. They may already have experience with GitHub Enterprise or come from a platform such as Azure DevOps, Team Foundation Server, GitLab, Bitbucket, Puppet, Chef, or Jenkins.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Metrics That Matter, explains the theory behind lean management and how you can measure performance and cultural change. It looks into developer productivity and why this is so important to attract talent and achieve outstanding customer satisfaction.
Chapter 2, Plan, Track, and Visualize Your Work, is about work insights: accelerate your software delivery performance by applying lean principles. You’ll learn how to plan, track, and visualize the work across your teams and products using GitHub Issues, Labels, Milestones, and Projects.
Chapter 3, Teamwork and Collaborative Development, explains the importance of collaborative development of software and how GitHub can be used for collaboration across teams and disciplines.
Chapter 4, Asynchronous Work: Collaborate from Anywhere, explains the benefits of asynchronous ways of working and how you can leverage them for improved and shared responsibilities, distributed teams, better quality, and cross-team collaboration. It shows how you can use GitHub Mobile, Microsoft Teams, Slack, and GitHub Pages, Wikis, and Discussions to collaborate from any location and any device.
Chapter 5, Influence of Open and Inner Source on Software Delivery Performance, describes the history of free and open source software and the importance it has gained over the recent years and in the context of cloud computing. It will teach you how to leverage open source to speed up your software delivery. Moreover, it will explain how open source practices applied to inner source will help you transform your organization, and the impact open and inner source can have on your in- and out-sourcing strategy.
Chapter 6, Automation with GitHub Actions, explains the importance of automation for quality and speed. It introduces you to GitHub Actions and how you can use them for any kind of automation – not only continuous delivery.
Chapter 7, Running Your Workflows, explains how you can tackle hybrid-cloud scenarios or hardware-in-the-loop tests using the different hosting options for the GitHub Actions workflow runners. It shows how to set up and manage self-hosted runners.
Chapter 8, Managing Dependencies Using GitHub Packages, describes how you can use GitHub Packages and semantic versioning together with GitHub Actions to manage dependencies between your teams and products.
Chapter 9, Deploy to Any Platform, shows how you can easily deploy to any cloud and platform with simple hands-on examples for Microsoft Azure, AWS Elastic Container Service, and Google Kubernetes Engine. It shows how you can perform staged deployments with GitHub Actions and how to use Infrastructure as Code to automate the provisioning of your resources.
Chapter 10, Feature Flags and the Feature Lifecycle, explains how Feature Flags – or Feature Toggles – can help you to reduce complexity and manage the lifecycle of features and your software.
Chapter 11, Trunk-Based Development, explains the benefits of trunk-based development and introduces you to the best Git workflows to accelerate your software delivery.
Chapter 12, Shift Left Testing for Increased Quality, takes a closer look at the role of quality assurance and testing on developer velocity and shows how you can shift left testing with test automation. The chapter also covers testing in production and chaos engineering.
Chapter 13, Shift Left Security and DevSecOps, takes a broader look at the role of security in software development and how you can bake security into the process and practice DevSecOps, zero-trust, and how you can shift left security. The chapter looks at common attack scenarios and how you can practice security and create awareness using attack simulations and red team | blue team exercises. The chapter also introduces you to GitHub Codespaces as a secure development environment in the cloud.
Chapter 14, Securing Your Code, describes how you can use GitHub Advanced Security to eliminate bugs, security, and compliance issues by performing static code analysis with CodeQL and other tools, successfully manage your software supply chain with Dependabot, and eliminate secrets in your code base using Secret Scanning.
Chapter 15, Securing Your Deployments, shows how you can secure deployments to your environments and how you can automate your complete release pipeline in a secure, compliant way to also meet regulatory requirements. The chapter covers Software Bills of Materials (SBoM), code and commit signing, dynamic application security testing, and security hardening your release pipelines.
Chapter 16, Loosely Coupled Architecture and Microservices, explains the importance of loosely-coupled systems and how you can evolve your software design to achieve this. The chapter covers microservices, evolutionary design, and event-based architectures.
Chapter 17, Empower Your Teams, is about the correlation of the communication structure of your organization and your system architecture (Conway’s law) and how you can use this to improve architecture, organization structure, and software delivery performance. It covers the two-pizza team, the Inverse Conway Maneuver, and a mono- versus multi-repo strategy for your code.
Chapter 18, Lean Product Development and Lean Startup, is about the importance of lean product management at a product and feature level. It shows how you can incorporate customer feedback into your product management, create Minimal Viable Products, and how you can manage your enterprise portfolio.
Chapter 19, Experimentation and A|B-Testing, explains how you can evolve and continuously improve your products by conducting experiments to validate hypotheses through evidence-based DevOps practices like A|B-testing. It also explains how you can leverage OKR to empower your teams to conduct the right experiments and to build the right products.
Chapter 20, GitHub: The Home for All Developers, explains how GitHub can serve as the holistic, open platform for your teams. It explains the different hosting options, pricing, and how you can integrate it in your existing toolchain.
Chapter 21, Migrating to GitHub, will discuss strategies to migrate from different platforms to GitHub and integration points for other systems. It explains how you can find the right migration strategy and how you can use the GitHub Enterprise Importer and Valet to perform the heavy lifting.
Chapter 22, Organize Your Teams, talks about best practices to structure your repositories and teams into organizations and enterprises to foster collaboration and facilitate administration. The chapter covers role-based access, custom roles, and outside collaborators.
Chapter 23, Transform Your Enterprise, puts all the pieces together. This book gives you a lot of tools that you can use to drive a successful transformation and to gain developer velocity. But only if all pieces are put together will the transformation succeed. The chapter will explain why many transformations fail, and what you should do to make your transformation a success.
To get the most out of this book
If you want to follow the hands-on labs to deploy to Azure, AWS, or Google you will need an account for the given cloud environment.
If you are using the digital version of this book, we advise you to type the code yourself or access the code from the book’s GitHub repository (a link is available in the next section). Doing so will help you avoid any potential errors related to the copying and pasting of code.
Download the example code files
The examples and hands-on labs of this book are on GitHub at http://github.com/wulfland/AccelerateDevOps and https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Accelerate-DevOps-with-GitHub. If there are updates to the code or labs, the GitHub repository will get updated.
We also have other code bundles from our rich catalog of books and videos available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/. Check them out!
Download the color images
We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots and diagrams used in this book. You can download it here: https://packt.link/vzP6B
Conventions used
There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.
Code in text: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: “You can customize the dialog to choose the issue template by adding a file config.yml to .github/ISSUE_TEMPLATE.”
A block of code is set as follows:
name: ? Custom Issue Form
description: A custom form with different fields
body:
- type: input
id: contact
attributes:
label: Contact Details
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
blank_issues_enabled: true
contact_links:
- name: ? Discussions
url: https://github.com/wulfland/AccelerateDevOps/discussions/new
about: Please use discussions for issues that are not a bug, enhancement or feature request
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
$ gh secret set secret-name
Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For instance, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in bold. Here is an example: “Open the following repository and create a fork by clicking Fork in the top-right corner of the repository.”
Tips or important notes
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