It is around 6:47 am, Novi’s wristband detects that he is about to wake up and it gently vibrates to indicate that it is time to wake up. It wakes him up at the right time and at a natural point in the sleep cycle that he is able to start his day immediately without the grogginess that usually follows an alarm call wake up. He collects data about his physical activity and finds that he has had enough of physical activities last week throughout to maintain a healthy lifestyle and he could afford to skip the exercise today. He switches on the TV just to find that the last month bill wasn’t paid, so he logs into his mobile app to pay the bill and the TV programmes come back to life. He also sets a recurring instruction to pay the bill automatically. A while later his phone alerts that his car pool mates have started and are about to reach his place in 30 minutes, he gets ready on time and reaches office. The office is equipped with a great canteen; it has multiple automated vending machines, automated trash collectors, state of the art coffee machines giving a perfect latte or cappuccino at a press of a button.

All this easy lifestyle stops at home and the cafeteria for Novi. Once he at his desk, the scene changes. There are around 20 developers in the team, they have been trying to integrate their code for the last one week and they had not been able to do so. Meanwhile the previous release had way too many bugs in production and it had to be rolled back which earned lots of bad reputation for the company. Every one in the team were angry, frustrated but still trying very hard to get through their day. People fell sick easily and there were not many people who could read another one’s code to fix bugs. The environments were not consistent in setup; it required long term context and undocumented knowledge to set an environment from ground up. People wished that the day at the office gets over soon so that they could go back home and rest.

Why this difference in lifestyle between personal and work place. Is it possible to have a cool and easy lifestyle at work? Yes it is possible, with some effort; just like how you have to invest in some gadgets and software to make your personal lifestyle cool. That lifestyle which can make our life cool and easy at workplace is “Continuous delivery”. Continuous delivery is a lifestyle choice for software projects, it requires upfront investment in learning the methods, practicing with discipline and using the appropriate tools (software and hardware).

In one of the recent projects we completed, we were having lunch with the product owner. He said  “for around 10 years, a software release meant a tough long week at the office and now things have changed so much that I am able to have lunch peacefully while a release is going on”.