Go Replaces Cruise - Aligns Devs, QA, and Ops

It turns out that ThoughtWorks Studios' former Cruise product is getting more than just a name change.  DZone spoke with Jez Humble, the Build and Release Principal at ThoughtWorks Studios, about today's launch of Go.   The new replacement for Cruise expands its release management capabilities and facilitates collaboration between Development, QA, and Production Ops phases.  You can also try a community edition for smaller-sized businesses.  

Continuous Delivery - A New Agile Movement

In response to what he believes are the shortcomings in Scrum (failures to address engineering practices) Jez Humble wrote a book on a new agile movement called Continuous Delivery.  While most large-scale agile frameworks include CI, TDD, automated builds (sometimes), and tight collaboration between the business and development sides, problems arise because there are manual handoffs to QU and IT Ops. 



In Continuous Delivery, there is tight collaboration between Developers, QA, and Ops.  Operational acceptance requirements are tested, defined, and planned upfront, and the releases are not hindered by operational constraints, but instead they are driven by business needs.  Environment management, acceptance testing, and deployment are automated.  Humble says that sites like Facebook and Twitter are successful because they can roll out new features quickly, frequently, and successfully through deparmental collaboration.

From Cruise to Go

TWS's Cruise product was essentially "CI on steroids," said Humble.  It was a Continuous Integration platform with release management functionality for small to medium-sized businesses.  On the other hand, Go (not to be confused with Google's Go language) provides release management capabilities for medium to large organizations.  For small projects there's even a community edition.



Go bridges development, testers, and ops by enabling fully auditable, automated, one-click deployments to testing and production environments.  It also provides CI and release management as a centrally managed service, which is another difference from Cruise.  



Go also introduces Environments such as model testing and production.  They can contain different versions of various apps and then audit back to the source.  Tests are much faster on Go because they are run in parallel on the grid.  The system can tell you which tests broke, which check-in broke them, and who was responsible.  Along with a new UI for centralized management there are also templates for defining re-usable workflows.  Go is now available through ThoughtWorks Studio.

Jez Humble also just published his book on Continuous Delivery with David Farley as a co-author.