Tips About Continuous Delivery Pipeline You Can’t Afford to Miss

Tips About Continuous Delivery Pipeline You Can’t Afford to Miss

​Advice for Establishing a Continuous Delivery Pipeline You Must Have a Continuous Delivery Pipeline or You Will Be Left Behind.

​​The Continuous Delivery Pipeline (CDP) is a set of procedures and processes that may take an idea for new functionality all the way through to its on-demand deployment to the customer.

A key part of the Agile Product Delivery capability is the pipeline. With the goal of delivering solution value as autonomously as feasible, each Agile Release Train (ART) constructs and maintains (or shares) a pipeline containing the assets and technology required to do so. The pipeline’s first three components—continuous integration, and continuous delivery—collaborate to facilitate the rollout of incremental updates to meet customer demand.

Details

The Process of Establishing and Maintaining a Continuous Delivery In comparison to conventional methods, Pipeline enables each ART to rapidly roll out updated features to their own user bases. Some people may understand “continuous” to signify a release each day, or even several releases each day. For others, continuous may imply periodic releases at a frequency of once per week or once per month, depending on the needs of the market and the objectives of the business.

Releases are often viewed as massive, unbreakable blocks in conventional practice. Still, in practice, there is no need for an “all-or-nothing” mentality when it comes to releasing value. Using a satellite as an example, the system components include the satellite itself, the ground station, and a web farm that distributes the collected satellite data to the public. Perhaps the web farm features are updated every day. Some details, including the satellite’s hardware, may only be made public at the beginning of each new launch.

The necessity for a single, unified release is eliminated when web farm functionality is untethered from the actual launch. Moreover, it improves Business Agility by facilitating the delivery of solution components in response to rapid shifts in market demand.

An Overview of the Four Elements of a Continuous Delivery Pipeline

A total of four steps – continuous delivery pipeline exploration, integration, deployment, and release on demand make up the SAFe continuous delivery pipeline. As a result of using the CDP, businesses can reorganize their pipelines to better serve their customers through continuous innovation. Improvements are fueled by feedback loops that exist between the different elements and between the customers and the business. Improvements to the process are typically the focus of internal feedback loops, whereas enhancements to the solution are more commonly the subject of external input. Improvements work in tandem with one another to guarantee that the company is “creating the right thing, the right manner” and consistently providing customers with what they need. Details about each part are provided below.

• In order to achieve consensus on what needs to be developed, continuous delivery pipeline Exploration (CE) focuses on discovering new opportunities for investigation. Design thinking is employed in CE to guarantee that the company is aware of the issue facing the market and the customer’s requirements, as well as the steps necessary to address the issue. It all begins with a hunch or a theory about what customers would find valuable, either in reaction to their own comments or to market research. Following this, we evaluate and investigate the ideas to determine what is required as either the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) or the Minimum Marketable Feature (MMF) (MMF). This helps expand the range of possibilities when considering what changes may or should be made to preexisting architectural frameworks and solutions. Understanding which Capabilities and Features, if implemented, are most likely to meet customer and market needs is the last step in the convergence process. The Program Backlog serves as a central repository for defining and prioritizing all of these.
• Features in the Program backlog are the primary target of continuous delivery pipeline Integration’s (CI) implementation efforts. When used with CI, design thinking tools in the problem area emphasize feature refinement (as when creating a user narrative map), which could lead to further investigation and the usage of tools in the solution space (such as user feedback on a paper prototype). Agile Teams put in place features after they have been thoroughly understood. All finished products are checked into version control, then developed, integrated, and tested thoroughly as a whole system or solution before being verified in a staging area.
• When modifications are ready, Continuous Deployment (CD) pushes them to the production environment. Afterward, their functionality is checked and maintained via constant monitoring. This phase involves putting the features into production, where the company will decide when to roll them out to customers. The organization may now react, revert, and repair things going ahead when necessary thanks to this feature.
• RoD refers to the flexibility of delivering value to clients either all at once or in stages, depending on the demands of the market and the organization. It allows the company to time releases to coincide with favorable market conditions and to limit the potential for loss with each announcement. Moreover, the pipeline actions that ensure the solutions’ continuous stability and usefulness after they have been released are also a part of Release on Demand.

However, the continuous delivery pipeline is not as linear as it sounds. Instead, it is a cycle of discovery that facilitates the formation of hypotheses, the development of solutions to test those hypotheses, and the subsequent incorporation of those results into future endeavors.

While a single feature moves in a linear fashion through the Value Stream, the teams tackle each step simultaneously. In other words, ARTs and Solution Trains will always: – 

• Explore user value 
• Integrate and demo value 
• Continuously deploy to production 
• Release value whenever the company requires it

The First Step is to Create a Workflow Map of the Current Process

All viable businesses already have a continuous delivery pipeline in place, without which they would be unable to release any value. However, these processes seldom see automation, thus they frequently incur lengthy delays and necessitate laborious, error-prone human intervention. The result is that businesses wait longer between releases, increasing the size and scope of such releases (“We’ll release when it’s big enough”). In contrast to SAFe Principle #6, which advocates minimizing batch size and limiting WIP, this practice encourages both.

Metrics can be applied to the mapped pipeline in order to gauge the value flow, investigate bottlenecks, and locate areas for enhancement (such as eliminating delays or reducing rework).

The time it takes to perform a single operation is known as its “process time”.

• It requires lead time or the amount of time between when one step’s work is completed and when the next step’s work is completed. Meaning: Lead Time = Time Delayed Since Previous Step + Time Taken to Complete This Step. There is no set amount of time between brainstorming and settling on a finalized concept. At the beginning of a system mapping project, it is normal to lack metrics on specific steps. Metrics can be collected on the variable section of the process while the remaining section is refined.
• We call this period of inactivity “delay time.” It takes an incredible 696 hours to deploy the Product Manager-approved work to staging once it has been accepted. A better value flow can be achieved by first identifying and then eliminating any unnecessary delays.
• What is meant by “percent complete and accurate” (%C&A) is the amount of work that can be moved on to the subsequent stage without any adjustments being made. Subpar work in earlier processes is a common root cause of setbacks. Percent complete and accurate is a useful statistic for locating the processes wherein low quality may be generating unnecessary delays in the delivery of value. Taking the work from the ‘Design’ phase to the ‘Code’ phase indicates that rework is necessary 20% of the time. In order to increase the value being transferred, it is necessary to boost the %C&A statistic. Rolling percent complete and accurate (%C&A) is an indicator of how likely it is that a task will be completed without any errors throughout the entire workflow. In this workflow, more than half of the items are undergoing some sort of revision, as measured by the cumulative rolled %C&A of 35%.

Converge the Existing Process with the Continuous Delivery Pipeline.

If you know how things now work, you can fit them into the SAFe Continuous Delivery Pipeline. Organizations can benefit from adopting a unified perspective thanks to mapping, which also facilitates effective communication of improvements and new developments.

Find the Weak Spots and Strengthen Them

Teams constantly search for ways to increase the speed of each individual process, which in turn decreases the overall lead time. That means taking care of issues like process time and quality (like how much of a job is done correctly). As that percentage rises, fewer tasks need to be redone, and more work may be processed in less time. Figure 6 demonstrates how the delay time (time between steps) is frequently the most important primary component. The term “delay time” refers to the amount of time spent on activities such as handoffs, waiting, and those that offer little value. There are two large holdups, and a lot of work needs to be redone in the first step of deployment because of this process. Eliminating unnecessary holdups is usually the quickest and most painless approach to shorten the entire lead time. When the ART is able to spend less time on rework, they can put their attention where it belongs: on value creation (e.g., for a software solution, instead of fixing bugs the team can focus on new features). Subsequently, prospects for improvement center on minimizing batch size and implementing the DevOps procedures detailed in the individual articles outlining the continuous delivery pipeline.

Controlling the Flow of the Continuous Delivery Pipeline

If you take a step back and look at the big picture, continuous delivery is a long and complicated procedure. The ability to do so is probably the most important one that every ART and Solution Train has. Even if a lot of the work is being done automatically, it’s still critical for stakeholders to be able to see and keep track of it. To increase output and locate and eliminate bottlenecks, they must have the option to set constraints on the amount of work that can be done at once (known as Work in Process, or WIP). And that’s why we use a tool called “Program Kanban”

Below is a rundown of the various stages that make up a Kanban system.

1. Called the “funnel,” developers can pitch their ideas for brand-new system features or improvements to current ones.

2. Analysis when features that seem most promising in terms of realizing the vision are dragged into the process. There, they are honed with respect to their most salient characteristics, such as the business benefit hypothesis and acceptance criteria.

3. Program backlog, where the highest-priority features are placed after analysis and ranking.

4. Implementing: At each Program Increment (PI) boundary, the most important features from the program backlog are moved into the implementing stage, where they are created and merged with the system baseline.

5. Validating on staging – Features that are ready for feedback are pulled into this step to be integrated with the rest of the system in a staging environment, tested, and validated.

6. features are deployed to production when capacity is available in preparation for release.

Features are released and the value hypothesis is tested when there is a good match between value and market opportunity. When the working hypothesis is confirmed, the feature can be considered complete and moved to the “done” column. DevOps Enabled CDP: Rapidly Bringing New Features to Market Throughout the whole value chain, specialized skills and tools are needed in order to construct, maintain, and optimize a continuous delivery pipeline. DevOps techniques are well-suited to facilitating this type of delivery system due to their ability to facilitate the rapid delivery of complicated solutions, as well as very short learning loops and high degrees of cross-functional cooperation. DevOps is the ideal method for setting up pipelines for constant delivery.

DevOps Enabled CDP: Rapidly Bringing New Features to Market

Specialized knowledge and equipment are needed at every stage of the value stream to construct, maintain, and optimize a continuous delivery pipeline. DevOps techniques are well-suited to enable this type of delivery system because they permit the quick delivery of complicated solutions with extremely short learning loops and substantial cross-functional collaboration. As a result, DevOps is ideal for setting up a continuous delivery pipeline.

The four facets and sixteen activities that make up the continuous delivery pipeline are represented by the outer two rings, which together form a closed learning loop that serves as a metaphor for the pipeline itself. DevOps ‘powers’ the CDP, which is represented by the inner rings. Members of the value stream employ a variety of practices and resources from each area to carry out CDP tasks. At the heart of the diagram is the SAFe CALMR approach to DevOps, which represents the collective worldview that should inform all actions and choices. In addition, the SAFe DevOps Health Radar helps ARTs evaluate the efficiency of their delivery pipelines and zero in on the DevOps techniques that will provide the greatest improvement. For additional information on setting up and optimizing continuous delivery pipelines, read the DevOps article series.

Conclusion

Any project worth it’s salt will require a reliable continuous delivery pipeline. Nevertheless, establishing one isn’t as simple as it would first appear. This blog post will outline those processes so that you can quickly and easily establish a pipeline for continuous delivery.

About Enteros

​Enteros offers a patented database performance management SaaS platform. It proactively identifies root causes of complex business-impacting database scalability and performance issues across a growing number of clouds, RDBMS, NoSQL, and machine learning database platforms.