Every month, Sitecore brings together developers from across the North West to share learning's and discuss their experiences of working with the platform. As Sitecore partners, we’ve been involved with plenty of these meet ups in the past, and so were pleased to not only host, but also present at, the latest user group event. In July, Computerlovers’ Richard and Ben talked about what it’s like to work with Sitecore in an agile environment whilst adopting a continuous delivery approach.

4.  What is it ?
 Why do we do it ?
 How do we do it ?
 Integrating with Sitecore ?
 What’s next ?
 Q & A

7. Test
Deploy
PromoteFeedback
Implement
Build

9.  Lots of good stuff out there
 Recent User group presentation & blog posts
 Lee Cook (Aqueduct) Continuous Delivery
 Kern Herskind - Exploring Sitecore Item Serialisation
 Alexander Doroshenko - Sitecore Continuous Deployment: From Zero to Hero

12.  It fits with our Agile approach
 Reduce Cycle time
 Takes the pain out of releases
 Automating the mundane leaves more time to innovate
 Continuous Feedback leads to Continuous Improvement

14.  2 week Sprint Cycle
 Deploy to UAT at the end of the sprint
 Automated Functional & Regression
Tests
 Client Approval
 Deploy to Production

15. Product Backlog
Sprint
Backlog Release
Daily Scrum
Sprint
(2 weeks)
Sprint review &
Retrospective

16.  Team City Build Server
 Solution built on every check-in
 Run Unit Tests
 Run Functional Tests
 Alert dev team on failure

17.  Visual Studio, SlowCheetah, Config
Transforms
 NUnit
 SVN (Moving to Git)
 Team City
 Nant, Powershell, Psake, Powercore
 Sitecore Courier
 Octopus Deploy

18.  Cucumber
 Capybara with Selenium 2 (webdriver)
and Poltergeist drivers
 Selenium grid 2 hub/nodes for
testing in parallel against both
desktop and mobile browsers.

20.  Code is the easy part
 Config transforms
 Multiple environments
 Different Server Profiles (CA/CD)
 Code reliant on templates/content
items

22.  Add Transforms to any xml file
 Preview Transformations
 Transforms run at build time
 Works with Octopus Deploy

24.  Any config file will be merged at
runtime – transform files will break
Sitecore
 3 Options:
 Maintain config per environment
 Manipulate with Powershell
 Single transformation file run against
all .config files in includes folder

27.  Manually create and install packages
 Automate Package creation installation
 TDS
 Unicorn
 Courier – more on this later

29.  Cruise Control
 Nant Build Scripts
 packaged executable
 Nant Deploy Script
 Custom config replacements per environment
 Manual Package creation
 All templates and layouts
 Slow prone to errors

30.  Team City
 Octopus Deploy
 Packages
 Sitecore courier + custom pipeline
 Creates update packages delta changes
 Reduce package size
 Quicker to transfer
 Quicker to install
 Quicker to publish

31.  Introduce internal QA environment
 Allows existing and new process to run in parallel
 Test deployment process
 Introduce more functional testing

32. • Build
• Unit Tests
• Smoke Tests
Dev
• Functional
Regression
Tests
• Client Approval
UAT • Release
Prod
4hrs
4hrs Total: 8hrs

33. •Build
•Unit Tests
Dev
•Automated
Functional Tests
•Smoke Tests
QA •External
Functional /
Regression Tests
•Client Approval
UAT
•Release
Prod
0hrs
1 hr
1hr
Total: 2hrs

39.  Templates & Layouts serialised to disk automatically on save/move/delete
 Item’s checked into source control with code
 Build runner generates a differential package against release tag
 Update package included in the nuget package
 Deployed and installed as part of release to each environment
 Release tag updated after release to production
 Next sprints work differential against last release

42.  Courier called using PSake via Runner. Build Parameters can be passed or use
defaults

44.  Courier can install any item Templates, Layouts, System Items and Content
Items
 But should you?
 Risk of overwriting user content
 Content packages created and installed manually
 Use defensive coding – If a sublayout requires a particular content item that
isn’t deployed then hide the component

45.  Localised developer serialisation folders
 Committed to Subversion/Git
 Differential package generated using Courier and Serialisation tag
 Sitecore Serialisation Issues
 Path Length

47.  Moved to Team City
 Automated Deployment Steps through Octopus to QA
 Deployment time down from 4hrs to approx 1hr
 Per sprint saves approx 1 day developer effort.
 Bolstered internal Testing Suite
 Reduced Cycle Time for issue resolution

48.  Git – Feature Branching
 Automated deployments to Oxfam environments
 Automatic load balancer switching – zero downtime
 Increased flexibility to release
 One click deployment

50.  SDN (http://sdn.sitecore.net )
 Team City (http://www.jetbrains.com/teamcity)
 Octopus Deploy (http://octopusdeploy.com)
 SlowCheetah (http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/69023d00-a4f9-4a34-a6cd-
7e854ba318b5)
 Sitecore-PowerCore (https://github.com/adoprog/Sitecore-PowerCore)
 Sitecore Courier (http://sitecorecourier.codeplex.com)
 Sitecore Continuous Deployment: From Zero to Hero
(http://sitecoresnippets.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/sitecore-continuos-deployment-from-
zero.html#.Ueahq_nVDzw)