How Walmart Achieved TRUE Agility

Walmart adopted Continuous Delivery across hundreds of projects with 10's of thousands of developers, and after years of trying to improve their software development approach with processes like SAFe, they eventually achieved agility by instead focusing on the engineering problems, and fixing them using the techniques of CICD.

In this episode, Dave Farley looks into the Walmart transformation and the 8 simple, but not easy, steps that it took to achieve genuinely transformational change.

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#softwareengineer #walmart #agile

[justintomlinson]

Love this one Dave, much needed simplicity of focus in world of ineffective complex lenses that just create more waste and work. 👏

[oliversteffe]

„The Phenix Project“ great book. loved it. 3:31

[edmundoogaz]

Wow, nice article! I worked in a company like this and it was great! In the beginning, we had to coordinate too many things to get to production, but we changed that with CI/CD (configuring a pipeline) to deploy to production, and it was very nice. In that situation, we used Kanban, and it adapted very well.

[andrewthompson]

This is a great article for helping with buy in. If walmart can do it, surely anyone can

[serdarcoskun]

each video takes you to a new level on understanding the development process, thanks :)

[softwarengineeringwithfabri]

once more, thanks!
I didn’t know the article.. it’s amazing to read such good real life experience and it’s especially good to see that teams can be agile even in big companies such as Walmart.

[joshuaDstarks]

“Agility” being used like my corporate overlords use it. 😂 The word is one of our core-tenants now post-COVID.

[RobKennedy]

There are trade-offs to breaking up dependencies and should be weighed when considering the move. At Amazon, I saw a team's CD broken often due to breaks in dependency tests failing. Systems were so large, developers needed to CI into main to see if things broke in the CI tests vs testing locally. Because of that, and the dependency checks in CD pipelines, CD pipelines could be blocked for days while dependent teams worked out their code issues.

[jasondbaker]

I'm curious to hear more about the management changes at Walmart and how this impacted the progress made towards continuous delivery. I have not met a senior software leader (vp level or above) in the past decade that had any experience with continuous delivery, so I can see how a new leader might approach these delivery processes with skepticism. At the same time, many leaders tend to be pretty conservative and avoid wholesale changes which could negatively impact productivity. Did this new leader see efficiency problems with continuous delivery processes? Or was it just a case that these processes were unfamiliar and they were uncomfortable supporting them? My experience is that every new CxO wants to make their new company look like their last company, so you have to be really careful picking these leaders.

[paulmess]

Excellent as we've come to expect from you, Dave! I understand "The Guiding Principles of Maintaining Our Software in a Releasable State" well, but I would like you to delve more into the details about the first iterations, what approach (strategy, tactic, tips) to take when we start building and we don't yet have an MVP o version 0.0 (aka version oh .. oh .. 😃 )

[jksmithiii]

By design, SAFe cannot support continuous delivery. Why? The backlog is a function of PI planning, and PI planning classically happens 4 times a year. Cripples learning and discovery with telemetry. Call it legacy+, but it ain't agile. I bet Boeing wishes SpaceX was using SAFe so they could both compete on the same cadence 😆

[Alanblumenmkt]

I would like to see a video about V-Modell and CI CD compatibility, I need some arguments to convince companies in Germany

[krumbergify]

Shouldn’t the Continous Delivery circle also include production monitoring?

[verfran]

perfect description of my current situation :)

[chriwas]

Great case story and very well presented.
How could one truely apply the CD principles in a safety-relevant industry such as railway systems where standards such as CENELEC EN 5012x prescribe waterfall processes? There are agile methods applied in these development projects, but they do not lead to CD.

[ianbridges]

It would be good to see a QA focused video 😊 let's talk about automation testing

[adicide]

coming up next, how the nazis achieved TRUE agility.