About this talk
This talk presents the challenges of the software delivery life cycle (SDLC) through the metaphor of a retail chain called Bridget's Widgets. The speaker illustrates the importance of shifting quality assurance (QA) practices to earlier in the process, promoting a strategy known as 'shifting left.' By moving QA before merging into the deployment branch, teams can avoid being burdened by defects later in the pipeline. The presentation highlights how Tugboat automates the creation of isolated, ephemeral preview environments for pull requests, enabling teams to test changes rapidly. Through this automation, developers can identify and resolve issues quickly, ensuring smoother transitions from development to deployment. Tugboat's features include automated regression testing and visual diffs, which enhance collaboration and approval processes among stakeholders.
Full transcript
Tugboat presents the tale of Bridget's Widgets. Imagine with me a retail chain with stores all over the world called Bridget hired three widget designers to dream up the most incredible widgets the world has ever seen. Tinkers receive designs for each new widget, which they began to make in their workshop. Once complete, another tinkerer would review the others work. They called this peer review. If the widgets passed
peer review, they would get packed into large containers and then loaded onto a big container ship. Hooray! The widgets are off to the stores. But wait, their widgets have not been inspected. Bridget decides to hire a bunch of quality-minded folks who will make sure the widgets are up to her high standards. The quality assurance folks climb aboard the ship and open each container, testing each and every
widget. One of the widget types failed inspection. That's a big problem. All the unwanted widgets are already packed on the ship. What can be done? The ship leaves at dawn. We can send the tinkers aboard. They can work all night until the widgets are fixed. Or we can identify which containers have the unwanted widgets. We'll carefully remove them without ruining the others. No, it's too much work
to unload the containers. The ship is leaving soon. Let's put tinkers on the ship to fix the widgets, but everyone is sad and tired. This whole way of thinking about making and shipping widgets is a bit of a dumpster fire. Sound familiar? That's right. We're actually talking about your software delivery life cycle or SDLC. To avoid this problem-filled process, the team needs to move QA to before
the merge into the deployment branch. This is what is called shifting left. Only after all that validation happens on the workstream branch, Is it then merged into the main deployment branch? I create a pull request to update the site's theme to dark mode. Tugboat springs into action. Let's check out what's happening in my project's Tugboat dashboard. Tugboat immediately started building the fully functional preview of my dark
mode changes with the same content as the base preview. In an isolated ephemeral preview environment, Tugboat merges my pull request into the main branch. This tells me exactly what would happen if I merge my PR right now. The base preview is on the right. It's set up just like the live production site with the same content and functionality. Looks like we're ready to preview and test my
changes. The whole process from PR creation to preview takes seconds, not hours. This preview is a fully functional isolated site ready to be tested and compared with the base preview, which represents the live site. Tugboat plus and premium plans include automated regression testing that you can review and approve when the visual change is expected. Back on the pull request, Tugboat posted a link to the preview, dashboard,
and visual diffs. The preview link can be shared easily. With automated checks passing, you have only to wait for approval from your stakeholders. From development to deployment, where are the bottlenecks in your software delivery life cycle? QA? User acceptance testing? Let's try and find a time for a demo. Wouldn't it be great to automate? Let me show you what we've been working on. Tugboat provides automated preview
environments, so you can test every change, no matter where you host. Get Tugboat previews for every pull request. Schedule a Tugboat demo today.
