title: | | Continuous Delivery | Building Trust in a Large-scale, Complex Government Organization papersize: a4
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Authors
Rodrigo Siqueira is a masters student at IME - The Institute of Mathematics and Statistics of the Sao Paulo University. His research interests include software engineering, operating system and computer architecture. He worked for two years with the Brazilian federal government as a coach and developer. Contact him at siqueira@ime.usp.br.
Diego Camarinha is a masters student at IME - The Institute of Mathematics and Statistics of the Sao Paulo University. His research interests include software engineering, computer networks and source code metrics. He worked for two years with the Brazilian federal government as a senior developer. Contact him at diegoamc@ime.usp.br.
Melissa Wen is a software developer. She worked on SPB project as a senior developer and also served as professor of Computer Science at UFBA - The Federal University of Bahia. Her areas of interest include software engineering and open source software development. Contact her at melissa.srw@gmail.com .
Paulo Meirelles received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Institute of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of São Paulo. He is full-time Professor at the University of Brasilia, and coordinated the new SPB portal project. His research interest areas are: Free Software, Agile methods, Static analysis, and Source code metrics. Contact him at paulormm@ime.usp.br.
Fabio Kon is Full Professor of the Department of Computer Science of the University of São Paulo. (...) .His research interest areas are: (...). Contact him at fabio.kon@ime.usp.br.
<!-- Fabio: Esse resumo está não usual porque ele não resume o que o artigo apresenta. Ele serve como uma motivação apenas. Mas talvez podemos deixar assim pra ver o que acontece -->
Abstract
For many software development teams, the first aspects that come to mind regarding Continuous Delivery (CD) are the operational challenges and the competitive benefits. In our experience, CD was much more: it was a survival technique. This article presents how and why we applied CD in a Brazilian government project for the development of a Collaborative Development Environment (CDE), sharing the challenges we faced and the strategies used to overcome them.
Introduction
From 2014 to 2016, we were part of a team that worked on a thirty-month-long Brazilian government project to modernize the Brazilian Public Software (SPB) portal (www.softwarepublico.gov.br) [1]. This project was a partnership between the Ministry of Planning, Budget, and Management and two public universities: University of Brasília and University of São Paulo.
During this time, the SPB portal evolved into a Collaborative Development Environment (CDE) which brought significant benefits for the government and the society: The government could minimize bureaucracy and software development costs, by reusing the same set of applications across different government agencies; society could more transparently follow government expenses and contribute to project communities.
In this article, we discuss the use of Continuous Delivery (CD) during our experience as the academic partner in this project. We focus on how we managed to implement CD in a large institution with traditional values and how CD helped to build trust between the government and the university development team. CD enabled us to show our progress and to earn the government’s confidence that we could adequately fulfill their requests, becoming an essential aspect of our interaction with them. According to this experience, the use of CD as a tool to build such trust relationships is yet another of its benefits [2].
Context
SPB is a governmental program created to foster sharing and collaboration on Open Source Software (OSS) development for the Brazilian public administration. In their own projects, the Ministry managed both software requirements and server infrastructure. However, its hierarchical and traditional processes made them unfamiliar with new software development techniques, such as CD. Any of our requests had to pass through layers of bureaucracy before being answered; accessing their infrastructure to deploy updated software was not different. The difficulties were aggravated because the new SPB portal is an unprecedented platform in the Brazilian government, with a complicated deployment process.
The project suffered significant interference from the board of directors throughout time because the portal represents an interface between government and society. In light of political interests, directors continually imposed changes to the platform while ignoring our technical advice. In 2015, the board of directors was changed and, with it, the vision of the project. New directors had different political agendas which affected the project's requirements previously approved.
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In this context, we overcame two distinct challenges: (1) deconstructing the widespread belief among government staff that any project in partnership with a University is doomed to fail, and (2) dealing with bureaucracies involved in the Ministry deployment process.
Firstly, our team was not from a typical company, consisting mainly of undergraduate students supported senior developers and designers, all coordinated by two professors. Accordingly, time and resources allocation, accountability, and team continuity might be construed as "unprofessional". On the government side, the SPB portal evolution was the first software development collaboration between universities and the Ministry staff involved, raising disbelief.
Secondly, our team approached software deployment differently from the Ministry. We believed frequent delivery is better for the project’s success. In contrast, the Ministry is used to the idea of a single deployment at the end of the project, and neither their bureaucratic structure nor their technical expertise was conducive to this style of work. That ended up hampering the benefits of the tool and preventing us from showing off the fruits of the project to those responsible for evaluating it.
<!-- Melissa: tentar dividir esse último parágrafo em 2? Tá cansativo ler ele todo - não consigo respirar :P -->
These challenges made our relationship with the Ministry staff tense, in particular during the first year, and alerted us to the fact that they could finish the project at any time. The deployment limitation was the substantial technical issue we could tackle in the short term. As a result, we worked to deploy one version of the project onto our infrastructure and showed it to the government evaluators. This strategy proved them we could efficiently provide new features, fulfill their expectations regarding the delivery of the requirements, and incited them to demand that the latest version be deployed in the Ministry infrastructure. This generated more pressure on the IT department responsible for the deployment routines. With each CD cycle, we gradually built a new relationship among all parties and, by the end of the project, we became active participants in the deploy operations.
Our Continuous Delivery Pipeline
SPB portal is a CDE with additional social features, having 83 software communities and 6,460 users. We built system-of-systems adapting and integrating five existing OSS projects: Colab (www.github.com/colab), Noosfero (www.noosfero.org), Gitlab (www.gitlab.com), Mezuro (www.mezuro.org), and Mailman (www.list.org). Colab orchestrates these multiple components and allowed us to smoothly provide a unified interface for final users, including single sign-on and global searches [1]. All these integrated systems represents a total of 106.253 commits and 1.347.421 lines of code.
The portal deployment follows a typical CD pipeline [3], adapted to the technical and organizational context of our project and the use of OSS best practices, as presented in Figure 1. It started when new code arrived; and when it reaches the production environment, we would restart the pipeline to release new versions.
<!-- Fabio: Neste ponto eu já gostaria de ter uma ideia do tamanho do sistema [..] eu gostaria de ter outros números como linhas de código [x], quantidade de componentes[x], usuários desenvolvedores esperados[Temos acesso?], etc. [atualmente, 83 softwares abrigado no portal?]-->
Automated Tests
Each integrated system had to be tested with its own test suite. This checking was not enough, however: we even had to test the platform as a whole. Given that the plugins also have their own test suites and these suites assume a double role as both plugin tests and as integration tests. If any test suite failed, by either a test error or coverage reduction below a certain threshold, the process stopped. Only when all tests passed, the pipeline proceeded to the step of release preparation.
Preparing a New Release
Each software component was hosted in a separate Git repository. A new component release was tagged referencing a specific new feature or bug fix. SPB had its own Git repository (www.softwarepublico.gov.br/gitlab/softwarepublico). An SPB portal release was an aggregate of versions of all its components. When a new component release passed all of the SPB integration tests, we manually created a corresponding new tag in its repository. Therefore, a new tag on any software component yielded a new SPB portal release. At the end of this process, we started packaging.
Packaging
After creating a new tag for a system, our DevOps team starts the packaging process. Packaging brings portability, simplifies deployment, and enables configuration and permission control. Our packaging software approach involves building separate packages for each system, in three steps: writing the script for the specific environment, building the package, and uploading it to a package repository. A set of scripts fully automated these steps. When all them ran successfully, the new packages would be ready and available for our deployment scripts.
Validation Environment Deployment
The Validation Environment (VE) is a replica of the Production Environment (PE) with anonymised data, and access restricted to Ministry staff and our DevOps team. To configure this environment, we used Chef (www.chef.io) and Chake, a serverless configuration tool created by our team (www.github.com/terceiro/chake). This tool maintained environment consistency, simplifying the deployment process.
Acceptance Tests
After a new SPB portal deployment in the VE, we used the environment to verify the integrity of the entire portal. In this step, Ministry staff also checked the new features, required changes, and bug fixes. If they identified a problem, they would notify the developers via comments on the SPB portal issue tracker, prompting the team to fix it and restart the pipeline. Otherwise, we could move forward.
Production Environment Deployment
After the VE check, we could finally begin the deployment in production, with the same configuration management tool, scripts, and package versions as in the VE. After the deploy was completed, both VE and PE were identical. At that point, new features and bug fixes were finally available to end users.
Benefits
CD brings many advantages such as accelerated time to market, building the right product, productivity and efficiency improvements, stable releases, and better customer satisfaction [2]. The charts presented in Figure 2 show these benefits of CD in our project and associates them with the creation of a DevOps team. In the time of 30 months, we deployed a total of 84 versions. Over 64% of these activities happened in the second half of 2015, with the DevOps team creation. Besides these results, working with the government, we noticed the following additional benefits.
Strengthening Trust in the Relationship with the Government
CD helped strengthen trust in the relationship between developers and the Ministry staff. Before using CD, they could validate features developed only at the end of the release cycle, usually every four months. With the implementation of CD, intermediate and candidate versions became available, allowing them to perform small validations over time. Constant monitoring of the development work brought greater security to the Ministry leaders and improved the interactions with our team.
Responsiveness to Change
Responsiveness was one of the direct benefits of adopting the CD pipeline. Political interests may change requirements and priorities at any time. The ability to react quickly to changes requested by the Ministry was vital to the project’s survival for 30 months. We noticed that if we took too long to meet their demands, they would threaten to reduce financial support and even cancel the project.
CD helped us keep the PE up-to-date, even with partial versions of a feature. Therefore, we always had something to show on meetings, easing their concerns about the final delivery of the platform. For our team, CD made developers more confident that the project would last a little longer.
Shared Responsibility
According to the conventional Ministry process, the development team could not track what happened to the code after its delivery, since their staff was the only ones responsible for deployment. The implementation of CD made our development team feel equally responsible for what was getting into production and take ownership of the project.
Interestingly, the CD pipeline had the same effect on the Ministry staff. They became more engaged in the whole process, opening and discussing issues during the evolution of the platform. Additionally, developers worked to improve the CD pipeline and speed up the process of making new features available in the production environment.
Synchronization Between Government and Development
The CD pipeline performance depended on the synchronization between our development team and the Ministry staff: each party had to be prepared to take action as soon as the other concluded a given task. Initially, the Ministry staff did not contemplate this in their schedule which, combined with the bureaucracy in providing access to the PE (up to 3 days), resulted in significant delays in the validation of new features. The use of an explicit CD pipeline helped us to identify critical points of delay, and increase our productivity.
<!--- Fabio sugeriu Lessons Learned, mas vamos mostrar exemplos da revista para ele olhar. -->
Lessons Learned
Due to the successful building of the CD pipeline, we improved the Ministry deployment process and kept the project alive. We now look at the lessons learned.
Build CD From Scratch
Taking on the responsibility for implementing CD impacted the whole team. Most of our team members did not have CD know-how, and we had few working hours available to build the pipeline. The construction and maintenance of the CD process were made possible by the key decisions to:
_Select the most experienced senior developers and some advanced students of the project to work on a specific DevOps team._These senior developers used their experience in OSS projects to craft an initial proposal for the deployment process. The solution enabled us to automate the deployment, even though the process was, initially, still rudimentary.
Interchange team members and encourage teammates to migrate to the DevOps team. The benefits were twofold: mitigating the difficulty in sharing knowledge between DevOps developers and feature developers, and evolving the process on-the-fly.
Overcoming Mistrust
Adopting an unfamiliar approach requires trust. Ministry staff, traditionally, expected and were prepared to validate and deploy a single deliverable. However, the steady growth of SPB complexity made large deliveries unsustainable. The CD approach was necessary. Therefore, we developed the following line of action to make this new dynamics possible:
Demonstrate actual results, do not simply tell. Initially, we did not have access to the Ministry infrastructure, so we created our own validation environment. Thus, we were able to follow the CD pipeline until production deployment, when we faced two problems. First, our pace of intermediate deliveries to the government was faster than the deployment to production by the Ministry staff. Second, specific issues of the Ministry infrastructure made some validated features not work as expected in the PE. That situation gave us arguments to negotiate access to the PE.
Make project management transparent and collaborative for government staff. Allowing the Ministry staff to track our development process showed them we were fulfilling our commitments. They started to interact more actively in the generation of versions and became involved in the CD. After understanding it, the Ministry staff helped us negotiate access to a VE with the Ministry leaders, creating as an isolated replica of the PE.
Gain the confidence of government staff. With the PE replica, we were able to run the entire pipeline and win the trust of the Ministry staff involved in the process. They saw the mobilization and responsiveness of our team to generate each new version package. They also recognized the quality of our work and deployment process. In the end, the Ministry staff realized that it would be beneficial for the project if they granted us access to the infrastructure, both VE and PE.
References
- P. Meirelles, M. Wen, A. Terceiro, R. Siqueira, L. Kanashiro, and H. Neri, "Brazilian Public Software Portal: an integrated platform for collaborative development", Proceedings of the 13th International Symposium on Open Collaboration. ACM, Article 16, 2017, 10 pages.
- L. Chen, "Continuous Delivery: Huge Benefits, but Challenges Too", IEEE Software, vol. 32, no. 2, 2015, pp. 50-54.
- J. Humble and D. Farley, "Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases Through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation", Addison-Wesley Professional, 2010.
<!--- Citadas apenas para definir coisas já disseminadas</p> <ol> <li>G. Booch and A. Brown, A. W. "Collaborative Development Environments", Advances in Computers, vol. 59, 2003, pp. 1-27.</li> <li>C. B. Nielsen, P. G. Larsen, J. Fitzgerald, J. Woodcock, and J. Peleska, "Systems of Systems Engineering: Basic Concepts, Model-Based Techniques, and Research Directions", ACM Comput. Surv. 48, 2, Article 18, 2015, 41 pages.</li> <li>J. Davis and K. Daniels, "Effective Devops: Building a Culture of Collaboration, Affinity, and Tooling at Scale", O'Reilly Media, Inc., 2016.</li> </ol> <p>Estava citada apenas na introdução dos benefícios</p> <ol> <li>T. Savor, M. Douglas, M. Gentili, L. Williams, K. Beck and M. Stumm, "Continuous Deployment at Facebook and OANDA", 2016 IEEE/ACM 38th International Conference on Software Engineering Companion (ICSE-C), Austin, TX, 2016, pp. 21-30.</li> </ol> <p>Considerar: 2017 State of DevOps Report <a href="https://puppet.com/resources/whitepaper/state-of-devops-report">https://puppet.com/resources/whitepaper/state-of-devops-report</a> -->