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Transcript:
“Pop Hutchison is a property tax law firm and we’re actually one of the largest in Texas and we’re getting to the point that we’re having an impact on the national scene as we slowly start to expand. We’re doing about 10,000 appeals a year now for our property tax and we’re in 160 counties of Texas mostly doing commercial property. There has been a tremendous lasting effect.
We engage them to help us with a specific product And what I got back was a way of thinking and a way of running our entire development process that has literally changed how I approach development, how our company approaches development, and has given us a benefit that’s going to last decades as this system goes through its lifecycle. So for our development cycle, it’s gone from being typically one to four weeks between builds to only days and, if necessary, hours.
The morale of our staff has changed quite a bit, mainly because they don’t have to stay up until one or two in the morning doing builds, even once a month. My morale is better because I don’t have to spend three days testing major builds anymore. It’s been the best investment I’ve ever made of a very expensive resource for two months to retrofit it into an existing legacy application. And now we don’t have that overhead because everything starts in that environment from day one. So I just, I can’t overstate the value of it.
I have a hard time even quantifying it because it approaches infinity for me because it’s on so many things that for a small company just is not possible if you don’t have a full-time development staff. Our greatest benefit from this continuous integration, continuous delivery approach is predictability on any given build, on any given release. I know it’s going to be in there. And we literally go to sleep the night before knowing that the system is going to automatically do everything from building the actual application, it will update the schema of our database, we’ll drop and rebuild our replication on our database, and we wake up in the morning with three emails in my inbox that says, good, good, and good.
That has a huge value for me that I never dreamed would come to me when I was at a company that has 55 full-time employees and one full-time developer. And that couldn’t happen without this concept of continuous delivery, continuous integration.
I explained the basic concept and I said, if you have any experience with trying to deliver technology in a company that doesn’t use technology as its main reason for gain, you will get it immediately. Because the benefit is so large and it’s across so many areas that it’s not just an easy thing to pinpoint because it really changes how you do things and how you count on them being done. But getting absolute predictability is a tremendous benefit.
So invest the time, invest the money, invest your energy as a senior manager in a company to push your weight behind it and get it through because it’s going to affect everyone when it’s actually place and they’ll all be happy for it. Even with all that drive to understand what was going on until I saw Jeffrey click on a button and say no, no but wait, watch this and you know you just sort of see the system going through an automated level. The second I saw it I could just hear everything fall into place in my head. I said I have to have this, not just for the tool that we were doing which was great. It was a live example of how it worked. But I had to find a way to retrofit our legacy system. And it’s paid off so many times, so many times.
I really do have a hard time quantifying because it’s just changed how we think about stuff and it’s changed how we do things. And every day that goes by, I don’t worry about builds anymore. I just don’t worry about it. And if bugs happen, we find them faster, we find them before they get out there. And it’s just, it’s like magic. It’s like magic.”
