Continuous Collaboration: Breaking down barriers in Software projects

Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg

Drupal & Open Source is rooted in collaboration, but as we’ve grown larger as a community, and as Drupal has been adopted and adapted for more complex use cases and organizations, collaboration has seemed to become harder. As a result, much of the feeling of enablement and empowerment has been removed from software projects. The desire to collaborate better within our teams, with the broader OSS community, and with our clients and partners, led Zivtech to adopt a Continuous Delivery model. But after finding that we still had too many barriers to collaborating we built Probo.ci, and used it along with Git, Jira, and some other tools to achieve “Continuous Collaboration”

This session will look at:



A brief history of collaboration & Drupal, from my eyes.
Bush : Music forerica/CivicSpace : Drupal : early Drupal companies & Acquia : Zivtech & other newer Drupal cos
The extreme challenges to collaboration that have arisen as Drupal has matured and been adopted by large organizations
Attempts to collaborate better CVS/SVN/Git, Devops,, CI/CD & Git, Jenkins, and the Drupal 7 Features and Strongarm modules and Drupal 8 Configuration Management.
Testing and code quality tools, such as Behat, Shoov/Backtrac/Wraith, & PHP CodeSniffer
The challenges we faced with CI/CD
Automation & testing help a lot, but not enough
Deployment is a bottleneck
Using Probo.ci alongside Slack, Zendesk, Github/Bitbucket, Jira, and more to achieve “Continuous Collaboration (CC)”
Questions answered by CI/CD & CC processes
The types of work and working relationships that open up when you break down barriers
Remaining challenges & barriers to collaboration
In Drupal
In development projects in general