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Scaling communication with Continuous Integration, by LB Denker

http://www.phpconference.co.uk/talk/scaling-communication-continuous-integration At Etsy, we continuously deploy code. New features and bug fixes can go from development to production in 20 minutes. We have maintained this low barrier to deployment over the past year despite nearly doubling the number of people that can deploy. Communication has a huge impact on the velocity of development and moving forward. We explicitly communicate over IRC, but we also evolve communication patterns through several other vectors, and one of those vectors is our Continuous Integration environment. In this talk I will not only discuss how communication patterns at Etsy have evolved with our growing development team, but I will also elaborate on how team size, role composition, motivation, culture, and available tools sets can impact communication patterns and subsequently throughput. LB Denker graduated from RIT with a BS/MS in Computational Mathematics/Computer Science. She then moved on to a small job in a small city in central New York before being courted by Google, bringing her to the Big Apple, where she worked in both test and development for over 4 years. Now she has taken a turn for the handmade, helping Etsy grow its spectacular development culture and continuous deployment process as the self-proclaimed Anthropologist of Developer Operations.

February 24, 2012