Thursday, November 23, 2017

EJBCA Development - Moving towards Continuous Delivery (finally...)

So a slightly more informal post from me, but I'd like to talk about a few of the changes we've been making in our development process here in the EJBCA team, and how they affect you as our customers.
I officially took on the role as Product Owner of EJBCA a bit less than a year ago without it really existing beforehand. How we got to that point is mostly historical and tied to our roots as an open source project. Tomas, EJBCAs founder and PrimeKey's current CTO was (and still is) EJBCA's face to the world, and with a small and tight development team around him responsibility for features, product cycles and roadmap was mostly ad-hoc, and this is where I came in nigh eight years ago as a developer.
In the time that has passed since then we've grown quite a bit and our user base has grown even more; as we mature from being a scrappy little FOSS project to what will hopefully be seen as a solid and well built software suite that can contend with the best of them.

Changes are coming, some which you all may notice directly and others that hopefully will be felt by us being quicker to adapt, better att keeping our deadlines and delivering better quality on the first try. One of the changes which has been silently in place for a while, but which I feel brave enough to advertise now is that we've moved towards continuous delivery:

A snapshot of our public repository. 
Since a while back the EJBCA team has been running on three week sprints, and with some tinkering we've finally gotten to the point where we can reliably produce a deliverable at the end of each sprint. Pictured above is the first Alpha of EJBCA 6.11.0, which we released at the end of the sprint on Wednesday. On Wednesday in three weeks it'll be joined by the next Alpha, and so forth until the release.
These Alpha releases are available for download for all Enterprise customers, the purpose of which is primarily for you guys to be able to evaluate and give feedback on ongoing development. In the future I'll also to try figure out a good way of showcasing the contents of each Alpha, while also making sure that there is some form of VM available for those of you who don't have a testing environment ready to deploy to.


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