While technology is an important component of DevOps and accelerating delivery, there are other aspects of process and culture that are critical to keeping the cycle moving to realize the goals of reducing lead time to become more responsive to the needs of the business.
If you go to most agile teams and ask the question of what is stopping them from going faster, they will typically respond that they are waiting for “something.” Something can include:
- Waiting for work to enter their backlog
- Waiting for environments
- Waiting for another development team to provide some service or capability that is needed
These obstacles include:
- Large batch sizes
- Lack of continuous flow of work into Agile teams’ backlogs
- Calendar-based gated releases
- Test environment complexities
- Environment availability
This manifests itself in the current state as shown below as the vicious cycle. When teams are only delivering system releases a few times a year, then the business believes it needs to pack everything it can think of into that release, since waiting for the next release incurs a delay of months. The leads to large complex releases with many dependencies. This, in turn, slows down the development and testing of these releases and requires a lot of release coordination, resulting in long lead times and the inability to release frequently. And this leads into the cycle repeating.
So what are the countermeasures needed to break this cycle? They include:
- Smaller batch sizes
- Architectural, design and development decoupling techniques
- Increased automation
- Readiness-based release capability
Smaller batch sizes require applying MVP (minimal viable product) techniques. When IT gains the trust of the business to deliver more frequently, the business will be more open to focus on the minimal product set of highest priority items it believes can deliver business value. Accelerated delivery provides the ability to test business hypotheses and gain feedback from customers more quickly to determine what worked and what needs changed. The enterprises that can turn this crank more quickly gain a huge advantage in the marketplace.
Modern web architecture techniques (e.g. microservices, APIs), along with design techniques such as feature toggling to enable dark- and canary-launching allow applications to be deployed independently and with direct control of customer impacts. This increases development velocity due to simplifying and reducing the lifespan for managing feature or release branches in the code base.
Increased automation combined with a move to readiness based releases allows application releases to be deployed when ready rather than waiting for calendar-based change windows. They key here is not sacrificing quality, auditability or security but rather building those capabilities into your applications and delivery pipeline and requiring those certifications are earned before an application can be released.
About the Author / Carmen DeArdo
Carmen DeArdo is the director of Build Technologies at Nationwide Insurance. He is responsible for helping drive accelerated delivery utilizing Lean and DevOps techniques across the end-to-end delivery value stream. One current focus area is the creation of an integrated delivery pipeline capability.
