In their presentation Bill Donaldson and Aimee Bechtle will share a summary of their tumultuous journey that has resulted in 75% of their corporate applications utilizing Continuous Integration with automated deployments, a 70% reduction in labor, and 288% reduction of cycle time. They will support these numbers with charts depicting the deployment volumes over the course of a 1.5 year adoption. They will share how by selecting the right applications, approach, and people, and using creative ways to advertise success, the new capabilities were embraced and adopted in their organization. The presentation will conclude with how Aimee has transformed her team to support Continuous Integration with auto deploy. Additionally, she will share why the 25% remain in the manual system and how she’s pursuing Continuous Delivery.

In 2011 Bill Donaldson and Aimee Bechtle were leading development and deployment operations teams in The MITRE Corporation’s corporate IT department. MITRE is a not-for-profit corporation whose mission is to provide the US Government world class Systems Engineering. MITRE’s IT was running well with a mature and stable release process. Bill’s team had successfully adopted agile development practices and was adept at producing high quality software code quickly. However, the successful adoption of agile introduced a problem between the developers and the deployment operations team lead by Aimee. Developers had to “hurry up and wait” on operation’s 24-hour SLA to build and deploy their apps. The SLA frequently expired due to multiple handoffs and human errors. Tired of the bottlenecks and lengthy cycle times one day Bill said to Aimee “24 hours is 23.5 hours too long”. This simple requirement sparked the vision for a transformation of MITRE’s software delivery process.

The deployment operations team was employing a manual, mature and repeatable process that had been in place for over 10 years. In fact, in 2012 the Release & Deployment Management process scored the highest among all the processes in an ITIL process evaluation. So why would Aimee be motivated to change? Because MITRE’s unique mission and culture values innovation, active cost management, and establishing MITRE as a showcase to their Government customers.

Bill from Dev, and Aimee from Ops, partnered to successfully deliver an enterprise continuous integration and automated deployment capability. Aimee took Bill’s requirements and declared them as acceptance criteria. Together they formed an influential, cross-functional team that was critical to building momentum and adoption within the organization. And together they experienced the pitfalls and challenges of implementing change, working against the resistors and laggards. At times project goals were in question but through determination, and keeping focus on the singular goal and utilizing expert help, they turned the project around. On June 6, 2012, upon a source code repository commit, MITRE’s first application was automatically built and deployed, cracking the doors to a new era in software delivery. Now, 65 software applications later, MITRE’s IT is poised to expand into the future with a sustained focus on DevOps and a Continuous Delivery architecture.