It’s 2021 and these are our observations after 2+ years interviewing over 150+ developers, DevOps, and cross-functional team members across a variety of industries and at various levels of business maturity - from nascent start-ups to long-running enterprises.
-It’s universally beneficial to bring QA into the Development process, to catch issues early, iterate quickly, and to merge clean code into Develop or Main.
-Virtually all teams from can benefit from a Full-Stack Preview capability and industry defined best practices for Previewing i.e. Continuous Previews.
-Many teams - typically more advanced teams with time, resources, and expertise - build and maintain an internal Full-Stack Preview capability.
-Most teams lack the time, resources, and expertise to build and maintain an internal capability - for most a Preview tool is on their wish list but there’s no clear choices or guidelines provided by either Open Source community, CNCF, or the industry as a whole.
-As a community we are not actively collaborating or innovating towards a well-defined Preview Process and technical capability: we should be.
-There’s no official Open Source Preview specific tool within the CNCF. There are several CI, CD, and deployment tools within the CNCF and more broadly across the industry. These tools, while useful, are fundamentally lacking for the task of Previewing and the requisite collaborative teamwork across cross-functional teams to produce quality working software.
-Previewing should be more about collaboration between the teammate(s) writing the code and the teammate(s) previewing what they’ve done than it is about deploying - “Individuals and Interactions over processes and tools.” https://agilemanifesto.org/
-The maturity of cloud native development, containerization, and container orchestration have laid the foundation for a Preview capability and best practices that nearly all teams can benefit from.
-Lead a community effort to define best practices for Previewing and to provide a modular, purpose-built, open source preview tool that will more broadly enable teams to benefit from a Preview capability.
-Provide well-defined purpose-driven guidelines for Previewing - see https://cpmanifesto.org