My project went live this week. You can see our web site here. My team and I are all very proud of our work, we have been building the LMAX exchange for several years now, but have only just released it. This may sound like the antithesis of Continuous Delivery, but actually we have been using most of the techniques outlined in my book for some years.
There have been several reasons for the delay in releasing our software, principle among them has been that as part of the launch of our business we have had to achieve approval from the Financial Services Authority, the regulator for the financial services industry here in the UK.
There are several aspects of this project that I am proud of, I’ll almost certainly talk about some of them in later articles, but the release this week has been a very gratifying experience. Mostly because it was in many respects a non-event. We have a big complex fully fledged enterprise system and if it wasn’t for the fact that we were all tracking news about our release on-line I don’t think that it would have been possible to see a difference in our office between this week (the week after our launch), last week (the week before) or indeed any week for several months in the past. We were still working on stories for the next release, in a couple of weeks time. We were still tracking the production systems and checking for any problems and we were still holding retrospectives about how to do better in future.
I think that is how releases should be, but it is hard to achieve. My book is about some of this, I hope to talk about more of this stuff in later blogs.
Although we couldn’t release our software to the public until this week this was not our first release. In fact we have already released the software to production lots of times, if you count test environments it is probably in the thousands. That is why our release this week wasn’t a big deal, but do you know what? It still feels like a big deal, but in a good way 😉