A 4 Step Checklist for Continuous Software Delivery in a Large Enterprise: A blog about the need for a software delivery process and how One Systems delivered one to one of our clients.
In the past, software was treated as a product. It was written, tested and released in a large release cycle once or twice a year. There were no users on it until the day of release, and then everyone pointed to it and said, “There it is! Isn’t it beautiful?”
With the advent of web applications, agile development and continuous integration, this approach is changing. We now expect to be able to see new features every single day. As developers, we are excited about this change and are always looking for ways to deliver more value faster to our customers. But working on larger projects can make this difficult; delivering new features can be like trying to drive at 200 miles an hour while pulling a barge behind you.
At One Systems, we have been helping clients with continuous delivery for over 10 years, since before it was “a thing.” We recently worked with a client who had very specific needs and challenges around continuous software delivery at scale. In this blog post we will discuss their situation, some of the challenges they faced, and how we helped
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A 4 Step Checklist for Continuous Software Delivery in a Large Enterprise
A blog about the need for a software delivery process and how One Systems delivered one to one of our clients.
A couple of months ago, One Systems had the opportunity to help establish a continuous delivery pipeline for a large enterprise client. Our customer had recently embarked on an initiative to close the gap between agile development teams and their operations counterparts. The goal was to bring all parts of the software development lifecycle together in order to produce better quality software, faster.
Our customer had identified several areas of improvement which included:
Modernizing their technology stack
Introducing microservices as a foundational building block for new applications
Adopting CI/CD as the new standard for software delivery
Replacing manual, error-prone processes with automated workflows based on DevOps principles
In this project, One Systems focused on implementing an end-to-end pipeline that would allow developers to build, test, deploy and monitor their applications as easily as possible. As part of this effort, we helped our client choose the right tools and services that would fit their needs best. We also built a custom dashboard and visualization tool so that developers could observe the health of their applications. This allowed them
A 4 Step Checklist for Continuous Software Delivery in a Large Enterprise
6/29/2017
By: OneSystems
This blog is about the need for a software delivery process and how One Systems delivered one to one of our clients.
The Process Needed
The client was looking for an automated continuous software delivery process to allow the customers to continuously integrate their code into an existing release train that would then be deployed and tested. The goal of this process was to decrease the software and test delivery times, as well as to increase the visibility of code quality. The client desired to have a complete end-to-end automation solution in place such that when a developer commits code it automatically gets built, tested, packaged and deployed through a series of different environments until it reaches the production environment. At each stage of this pipeline the code was tested by various automated test suites. Once all tests were passed then the package would move to the next environment.
One Systems Approach
One System’s engineers began by identifying metrics around which they could measure success or failure of the project. We decided that we would measure:
o Software delivery time (from commit to deployment)
o Code quality (number of defects, percent coverage, etc.)
A 4 Step Checklist for Continuous Software Delivery in a Large Enterprise
Continuous software delivery, also referred to as continuous integration and delivery or CI/CD, is not just about the mechanics of implementing a process for automatically building, testing, and releasing software. The process must be part of an overall strategy that enables the organization to deliver business value continuously by reducing lead time and costs while increasing quality. In this blog post, I will describe the strategy that One Systems used to help one enterprise client implement its first continuous software delivery process.
The 4 step checklist:
1) Understand the relationship between business capability and software architecture
2) Select the right tools for each phase of the continuous delivery pipeline
3) Implement an automated pipeline that enforces policies and guidelines as code
4) Monitor your progress through KPI dashboards
This strategy is based on our experience building automation solutions for large enterprises in various industries. I will also describe how we delivered a complete working solution to our client in only 3 weeks.
A 4 Step Checklist for Continuous Software Delivery in a Large Enterprise
Software delivery teams are facing a lot of challenges today. Not only do they have to create software, they also have to implement it, monitor and maintain it. To cope with these challenges and ensure the high quality of their products, many companies are implementing continuous delivery practices.
At One Systems Inc., we recently implemented a continuous delivery process for one of our clients, a global leader in the telecommunications industry. This blog post focuses on the key components that have helped us succeed in this project. If you are working to implement continuous delivery in your company, please consider the following steps:
It was a beautiful day in the neighborhood!
There has been a lot of talk about continuous software delivery and DevOps lately. And it’s not just hype. For the right companies, continuous delivery can bring a lot of advantages. It can get new products to market faster and make changes to existing products much easier. In this article, we’ll take a look at how one of our clients implemented continuous software delivery in their organization and what you need to consider if you want to do so as well.
If you’re thinking about implementing continuous delivery, here are four steps you need to follow:
1) The first step is to establish a Software Delivery Process (SDP). You need an SDP because every change that is made to your software needs to go through some form of quality control process. This process should be standardized and automated as much as possible. The goals of your SDP are twofold:
a) To ensure that all changes meet the requirements of your business and
b) To ensure that all changes go through the same testing process before being released into production.
Brick-and-mortar businesses are arguably much easier to scale than online ones. The latter relies on some combination of building a brand, generating lots of traffic, and/or creating a great product that converts well.
For brick-and-mortar businesses, you simply need to replicate what you’ve done in one location and do the same thing in another. It’s harder than it sounds because people are different where you’re going, but at a high level, scaling is about finding locations with similar demographics and placing stores there.
In a perfect world, this would be all you need to do to scale up a business. Of course, the world isn’t perfect. There are things that can go wrong with your plan that have nothing to do with where you put your stores or how many products you stock on the shelves.
For example, many businesses rely on software for everything from inventory management to front-end sales and customer service. In order to really scale a business, you need to make sure your software scales alongside it. If it doesn’t, then you end up having two problems: one with your business and one with managing it effectively. That makes scaling much more difficult!