Welcome to continuous delivery and DevOps. Amazon famously commits code to production every 11.6 seconds and they're always learning really fast how to better sell you your next pair of rubber boots, your next mousetrap whatever. That may seem a little remote or little bit forbidding. But the reality is if you break this job of getting to a more continuous capability into small pieces, you will eventually get there and you'll reap rewards all along the way. If you're here, you probably want to increase your velocity and by velocity I mean how fast can you and your team go from some observation about something that would be valuable to the customer, over to something you've gone and been able to release out to the user and observe. Teams that are able to do this have what I would call a continuous design capability where they're constantly coming up with high-quality testable ideas and then they have a continuous delivery capability here where they're able to execute those and move out to the customer really fast. Breaking this down a little further, the teams are doing this internally and then releasing, that's usually referred to as continuous integration. So sorry inside the company inside the team and even when they move to a capability where they're able to take that and actually bring it all the way out to the customer that's usually what's referred to as continuous deployment. And these are the things that we're going to talk about here in the course. How do you start? How do you focus? How do you get there? My name's Alex Cowan and I'm here on the faculty at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business. Before that though, I was in the software business, I started some companies, I worked in sales engineering, I worked in operations. I did a ton of grunt work and I did a ton of manual tasks that were at once kind of boring and often also kind of anxiety inducing. Because we had like 12 steps we had to go through to upgrade some server that was in a live environment and as I started to learn about how people were automating these things, and standardizing them and treating all these tasks as software or infrastructure to be automated, I realized that this was an amazing capability and it made everybody's works so much better and it made the delivery so much smoother and that's why I'm so excited to step through this course with you. What we're going to do here is we're going to learn about the fundamental jobs of testing and operations and how they relate to development so that you understand them and you're comfortable at the fundamentals. Then, we're going to kind of pair those with the methods and the tools and the emerging practices that are working really well for teams that are moving towards this more continuous capability. What I hope you'll be able to do by the end of the course is sit down with your inter-disciplinary team and do three things. One, sketch out your pipeline as it is right now. So how do we go from idea to something that's out there for the customer. Then secondly, how do we break down the things that we wish were better and how do you facilitate those kinds of ideas and those priorities. Then thirdly, how do you chip away at these things, so how do you introduce testable ideas about what investments in your pipeline are going to make the pipeline healthier, are going to make the team work better and gradually just chip away at this on a highly prioritized basis where you're reaping rewards all along the way and steadily making things gutter. Who should take this course? Well, I would say that if you're a product manager, a project manager, a developer, an Ops person a tester, you want to make your pipeline healthier you're going to learn about that here in the course. We're going to look at these things from a kind of general overview and then we're also going to look at some sample code. Even if you don't code now, that's fine, I think that seeing some of this code and generally looking at how it works and how it relates to testing will help you understand this topic better and execute on it better. If you want to learn the very latest techniques and unit testing Ruby, this is probably not the right course for you. But, if you want to show your colleagues how continuous delivery works or what DevOps is, send them on over her because that's what we're going to do. I think you're going to really enjoy the course. Thanks for joining me let's get started.