In recent years, the continuous delivery pipeline has shown to be a productive tool for creating digital goods, and it is now a prerequisite for your business to succeed as a great digital goods firm. A special framework for developing digital products, The ADAPT Methodology® ensures the success of leaders in the digital age!
The ADAPT Methodology® was developed because society has changed and leaders now require support in how they lead and design their digital product organizations. But before we do that, let's take a closer look at the Sprint Review meeting.
A contemporary software development technique known as the Continuous Delivery Pipeline (CDP) links together many phases of software development, including automated builds, tests, and deployments.
The mentioned ideas will still hold true whether your firm has more or fewer steps in its pipeline. You will comprehend how to apply CDP more effectively if you are familiar with the Agile Methodology and the Scrum Methodology because both techniques have similar guiding principles.
The steps of the Continuous Delivery Pipeline don't actually need to show physically, contrary to a frequent misperception about it. These logical steps can be seen as maps that link environmental checkpoints like testing, staging, and production.
Three key ideas—quality, frequently, and predictably—are taken into consideration by firms while adopting a CDP.
You'll see that these ideas are stressed across the continuous delivery pipeline as you read this essay.
A CDP's main objective is to take a concept and turn it into value for the user through a succession of automated testing, staging, production, and delivery steps.
The genius of having a CDP in place is that through a constant loop of activity and feedback, firms get to investigate, integrate, and deliver useful items into their market regularly and reliably.
The CDP may be thought of as an automated and dependable framework that contains a series of processes that code changes will go through on their way to production if you want to understand how this works.
In other words, the CDP enables software companies to effortlessly provide their customers with high-quality products on demand. Thanks to an effective procedure that develops, examines, and determines whether a product is suitable for the end-user.
A continuous delivery pipeline has the advantage of better manufacturing and delivery, which leads to delighted customers using high-quality products with cutting-edge technology.
Therefore, it is imperative that errors are avoided to the greatest extent feasible for digital product companies that aspire to become leaders in their respective sectors.
Companies that strive for agile transformation in the digital age are the ones that create the required structures and procedures that turn them into market leaders with reachable growth and satisfied clients.
The four main steps of the software delivery process are Continuous Exploration (CE), Continuous Deployment (CD), Continuous Integration (CI), and Release on Demand (RoD), and these four processes make up the Continuous Delivery Pipeline.
Each stage's goal is to assess the new features' usability and quality from many perspectives while guarding against user-impacting disasters. Later in the text, we will go into detail about how each stage functions and how they all work together seamlessly.
As the name implies, this stage focuses on exploration and design thinking, during which the company makes assumptions about potential new concepts and services for its target clients. Receiving and analyzing market research and client input is how this is accomplished.
Teams collaborate to examine and interpret data streams during the CE stage in order to determine what is necessary to satisfy market demands, such as a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) or Minimum Marketable Feature (MMF).
Teams in CE can assess what can be changed or updated by looking at the current structures and solutions. Additionally, this is where concepts for features and abilities are researched and developed. These changes are then described and meticulously prioritized in the Program Backlog, which is the final step.
Simply put, this is where parts—small, distributable, and testable units of goods—are constructed and kept in preparation for testing.
Features and components are used in the stage of Continuous Integration after being added to the Program Backlog. This is the stage where refinement occurs in a staged environment. To assess a product's robustness, stability, and quality, CI employs a variety of tests and evaluations. When something fails, it is reported, sent back to the team for revision, and then put though a number of tests and validations again.
This stage of the process, which resembles a finish line, involves taking the features and updates from CI's staging environment and putting them into production after they have successfully passed all the tests. At this point, the features or modifications are monitored and again evaluated to make sure they work as intended. This is yet another crucial stage of the CDP since it is at this point that the company chooses when to make the new product or update available to customers.
Businesses decide when and how best to make a new feature or product available to customers during the stage of release on demand; depending on the market and company requirements, the update may be provided all at once or in phases. Businesses may carefully control the level of risk for each release here.
The CDP gives an overview of changes and feedback to the development team and everyone else engaged. As a result, the CDP gives developers the confidence they need to work on their products because the entire process is laid out as a dependable, repeatable, and predictable roadmap.
Humans are known to make mistakes and defects, and while this is a given, it creates a significant issue when it comes to situations when there is little room for error. Reducing the likelihood and prevalence of defects is crucial when it comes to software.
Naturally, there will occasionally be flaws in software, but having an automated framework that functions well makes a big difference because pipelines don't malfunction when under stress or strain from pressing deadlines.
Simply said, greater outcomes are achieved with less human interference.
The reason for this is that teams used to prepare for the worst-case situations during manual releases because the likelihood of something going horribly wrong in those circumstances was significant.
Solutions like the Customer Advisory Board (CAB), a type of manual approval, were adopted to improve the system. This was helpful, but it wasn't a foolproof method because, as was already said, humans make mistakes and work inefficiently, which makes the process tedious and slow.
In contrast, everything in pipelines like the CDP is programmed to function as predicted, leading to predictability. The order between the stages flows easily since each stage of the pipeline is created to operate in accordance with precise protocol, hence the name "pipeline."
One could worry about the quality of a product in the quick-moving environment of a pipeline, but don't worry—this is also taken care of throughout the pipeline by built-in sets of tests and criteria that serve as gateways.
As a piece of code moves through the pipeline, it is thoroughly examined and tested to uncover any flaws; if this occurs, it is rejected, and the system notifies the team with a report outlining the findings.
What happens next, though, if no issues are found and every test is successfully completed? You are correct if you believe that production is the subsequent stage.
Thus, owing to these pipeline gateways, problems are prevented from reaching production, ensuring that only high-quality products are offered to customers.
And that's basically how a pipeline like the CDP operates; little updates or enhancements to software move through the pipeline and, assuming they pass all tests, finally reach production.
The teams are allowed to release features and products in an auditable and risk-free way each time the pipeline is successful.
Perhaps you're now wondering if there even is such a thing as a standard pipeline. The fact is that each company will have its own version of the pipeline because the product's design determines how it is structured.
Whether the structure is straightforward or complex, the continuous delivery pipeline's main objective—the effective and timely release of high-quality software—remains the same.
The ADAPT MethodologyTM is what you've been looking for if you're an executive leader seeking a tried-and-true CDP plan that can assist your business in finding success and satisfied clients.
You'll have all the information and tools need to set up you and your digital product firm for success using the ADAPT MethodologyTM.
Now, this doesn’t mean that human intervention is completely eliminated from the pipeline. Even today in the digital era, many digital product companies still involve some form of human interaction in their pipelines for various reasons.
In fact, this is a good time to explain another misconception between two terms that share the acronym CD: Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment.
Often used interchangeably, continuous delivery and continuous deployment are similar frameworks but also strikingly different from each other. You see, when we talk about having some form of human intervention, at least in the space between staging and production like deciding on when to send out a release, we are talking about continuous delivery.
Some of the people responsible for these checks and approvals are known as CAB, Project Managers (PM), and Scrum Teams. And then when we talk about a framework that has zero human involvement in the pipeline, we mean continuous deployment.
Continuous deployment is just like continuous delivery but the key difference is that the releases happen automatically.
As daunting as the idea of zero human involvement sounds, it’s been proven to work for many companies already, most of these are large companies that operate on a huge scale which makes this version of the pipeline ideal and sustainable.
Differences aside, both forms share an automated process and structure so companies can decide which version suits their needs and capabilities.
It's perfectly acceptable if you're still debating whether or not you ought to adopt the CDP's approach. Weighing the benefits and drawbacks is necessary before making major changes. We've included the factors you should think about below to aid in your decision-making.
Keep in mind that the CDP is not magic. While it is a wonderful, intelligent solution, the reason it works so well is because of high standards through continuous, daily improvement. If you want to learn more about how to level up your existing pipeline for maximum results and efficiency, you can take our Digital Product Maturity Scorecard and also read our book ADAPT.
Before we explain the steps you can take to get started with CDP, here are several conditions to be aware of:
In order to get the job done without hiccups, development teams need a pipeline that’s optimized. To achieve this your CDP needs to have support in the form of platform provisioning and configuration management, having this means your team has the ability to design, maintain and disassemble complete environments either at the push of a button or automatically.
With automated platform provisioning, you can begin horizontally scaling your business and your software changes have the opportunity to be deployed and tested against properly configured and replicable environments (i.e. sandboxes).
Since we have covered the fact that the CDP connects multiple stages, it only makes sense that different groups of people be involved in the collaboration and supervision of the entire process. So, if you want to make things work properly in your pipeline, everyone has to be dedicated to ensure its success.
Since the ultimate goal of the CDP is to help companies efficiently release quality products to the market in a timely fashion, it is an absolute must that you adhere to high standards of quality before even thinking of releasing a new update or functionality to the public. Don’t cut corners when it comes to this as the last thing you would want is to deliver sub-par products to your customers.
The ideal approach to getting started with the CDP is to start strategically and gradually. It is not advisable to rush into implementing the Continuous Delivery Pipeline all at once.
A recommended starting point is to evaluate your entire business framework and identify the biggest bottlenecks that are present. Once you have identified these bottlenecks in your organization, start by improving one part at a time to test and measure the improvements.
When your current pipeline is finally laid out and understood, you can then visually integrate its mapping into the model of the CDP. Doing this helps your organization clearly see how the entire flow would look once it is improved.
Now that you have a map of your current pipeline and the CDP, your team can begin looking for areas where improvements can be applied to reduce total lead time and boost efficiency. This step also includes looking at processing time and the quality (percent complete and accurate) of every step.
When the CDP is viewed from a wider perspective, it becomes apparent just how extensive of a process it actually is. And because of its importance in the software development lifecycle, it is crucial that every single part of the pipeline is tracked and monitored, even if a large portion of it is automated. Because in doing so, you have the ability to incorporate Work in Progress (WIP) limits which help improve throughput and pinpoint and tackle bottlenecks. To do this you can make use of the Program Kanban.
Given that the CDP is a type of delivery system which involves the speedy delivery of complex solutions within very short learning loops and high standards of cross-functional collaboration, it makes absolute sense to equip it with DevOps methods.
Now, the question is, is CDP a right fit for your organization? Let us know and comment below!