Engineering Enablement by Abi Noda | How Slack fully automates deploys and anomaly detection with Z-scores

This week we’re joined by Sean Mcllroy from Slack’s Release Engineering team to learn about how they’ve fully automated their deployment process. This conversation covers Slack’s original release process, key changes Sean’s team has made, and the latest challenges they’re working on today.

Discussion points:

(1:34): The Release Engineering team
(2:13): How the monolith has served Slack
(3:24): How the deployment process used to work
(6:23): The complexity of the deploy itself
(7:39): Early ideas for improving the deployment process
(9:07): Why anomaly detection is challenging
(10:32): What a Z-score is
(13:23): Managing noise with Z-scores
(16:49): Presenting this information to people that need it
(19:54): Taking humans out of the process
(23:13): Handling rollbacks
(25:27): Not overloading developers with information
(28:26): Handling large deployments

Mentions and links:

Read Sean’s blog post, The Scary Thing About Deploys
Follow Sean on LinkedIn

Creators & Guests

Host

Abi Noda

Abi is the founder and CEO of DX (getdx.com), which helps engineering leaders measure and improve developer experience. Abi formerly founded Pull Panda, which was acquired by GitHub.

What is Engineering Enablement by Abi Noda?

This is a weekly podcast focused on developer productivity and the teams and leaders dedicated to improving it. Topics include in-depth interviews with Platform and DevEx teams, as well as the latest research and approaches on measuring developer productivity. The EE podcast is hosted by Abi Noda, the founder and CEO of DX (getdx.com) and published researcher focused on developing measurement methods to help organizations improve developer experience and productivity.