The first phase of a major BCBST software delivery transformation, the first steps toward enabling true DevSecOps and CI/CD, is on target for completion by the end of 2018. Other teams had attempted this transformation before, but those attempts ultimately failed for various reasons. In early 2016, I was asked to step out of my role as Portal Architect / Portal Team Lead, learn how to “Do the DevOps,” and to “Build a team to pull that project out of the ditch.”

I knew little of DevOps at the time, but with plenty of experience around build and delivery automation I was able to come up to speed quickly and by Q3 of 2016 had built and trained my very own motley crew of interns, former manual QA analysts, a Java developer, and a performance testing engineer that was ready to take on the challenge.

This talk covers the key points of failure from the previous attempt and the changes I made that allowed my amazing team of magnificent misfits to resurrect a dead project and successfully deliver transformation in just 18 months… All with no prior experience, a tiny budget, an overly prescriptive process that we had almost no control over, and an outdated, inherited pipeline that users had already refused to adopt once.