Releng 2013 keynotes: John O’Duinn (Mozilla) and Roman Scheiter (LinkedIn)

There are two exciting keynotes planned for Releng 2013

John O’Duinn, Director of Release Engineering at Mozilla will kick off the workshop with his keynote Release Engineering as a Force Multiplier.  The build and release process used to be a pain point at Mozilla, but now makes the company and community more productive as a whole.  John will describe how the team added support for project branches to allow concurrent development, rethought continuous integration and increased capacity by moving to a hybrid-cloud build infrastructure. These changes improved several aspects of the business, including switching to a rapid release model and reducing turnaround time on a release from weeks to hours.  As a result,  Mozilla improved its abilities against much bigger and better funded competitors in the marketplace while also allowing them to enter new markets and help ensure its long-term success.

Roman Scheiter, Engineering Services Director at LinkedIn, will present the afternoon keynote entitled Against All Odds – Completely Overhauling Linkedin’s Release Process.  This session will cover the evolution of LinkedIn’s release process from its earliest days to the point where the rapidly growing engineering team necessitated a radical shift. This shift, an executive sponsored effort to address technical debt and introduce new thinking to boost engineering efficiency allows six hundred developers to release thousands of changes per week without compromising quality.  As part of this undertaking, LinkedIn learned many best practices, developed tools and custom infrastructure, and lived through the internal cultural changes needed to make this independent release process work.   Roman will detail the evolution and results of this shift so you can learn directly from LinkedIn’s pain.

In addition to these fantastic keynotes, we also have talks from release engineers and researchers from Netflix, Google,  Microsoft, Gnome, Red Hat, IBM, several universities and more!  We’ll also have a panel at the end of the day to discuss the future of release engineering.

Check out the full program on the Releng 2013 site.  To register for the conference, which is managed as part of the larger ICSE conference, you can follow this link and choose the one-day-workshop.  See you in San Francisco on May 20!