It seems like a lifetime ago, but a few short years ago I was leading a $100 million government project for a large system integrator that involved 50+ developers, 20+ testers, 15+ managers, 5+ ops and a cast of characters. Once a week we had to do our deploy.

Despite using Scrum, Cruise Control, SVN, Java, Eclipse, Guava, Google Guice, UML, JUnit, PMD, Findbugs, Checkstyle, MDD, TDD, eclEmma and mostly modern tools; our deploy process was a fragile, long, manual, person intensive process. Each Friday night we started. A long email thread began the process with a text check list that we…