What is Continuous Delivery in SAFe?
The goal of the Agile Manifesto is to satisfy customers through continuous and early release of worthy software. When you are using SAFe, you might have heard about the continuous delivery pipeline. A Continuous Delivery Pipeline, is also called the pipeline that denotes the automation, activities and workflows needed. These are needed by an organization for providing an ongoing delivery of worth to the end-users. The continuous delivery pipeline generally encompasses four elements. They are Continuous Exploration, Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment & Release on Demand. The first three are denoted as CE, CI and CD in a SAFe atmosphere.
Source: Scaled Agile
In Agile Product Delivery Competency, this pipeline is a considerable aspect. Every Agile Release Train shortly referred to as ART develops and retains or segments a pipeline. It is done with the technologies and assets required for the delivery of solution value as separately as possible. Let us consider business plans for the delivery of tiny packages of new functionality. In this case, the initial three aspects of the pipeline CE, CI and CD function in association with each other. The packages are thereafter delivered for meeting the market demand.
Why is Continuous Delivery Pipeline Important for Agile Release Train?
Developing and preserving a continuous delivery pipeline does one thing to every Agile Release Train. They provide ART with the capability to bring out new features to users. Above all, this can happen more frequently as compared to what happens in the traditional delivery pipeline. For some organizations, continuous delivery can be understood as a daily release. On the other hand, for some, it can denote every week or month delivery. It all depends on the market demand and the enterprise objectives.
In traditional practices, organizations see releases made in large batches. Nevertheless, when it comes to releasing value, it need not turn out to be “all or nothing”. For better understanding, let us take satellite as an illustration here. For a satellite, the elements include not only the satellite but also a web farm. It is responsible for carrying the data acquired by the satellite to end-users. Also, a ground station is an element for a satellite. In this case, some portions of data can be released every day. On the other hand, some of them can be released during every launching period. As some portions are released regularly, the formation of huge batches of release is eliminated. In turn, it helps improve business agility. It happens because it allows elements of the software to be released in reply to changes in the market needs then and there.
The Four Elements of Continuous Delivery Pipeline Explained:
As mentioned earlier in the SAFe Continuous Delivery Pipeline, there are four elements. The CDP helps businesses to chart their present pipeline to a fresh arrangement. Then, they can use relentless improvements for delivering value to customers. It is possible to bring improvements using the feedback loops. These loops can exist externally between the customers and the business. Also, they can exist internally between the aspects of CDP and within them. These loops pay attention to process improvement. But, the loops with customers fuel improvement of solutions. Together these loops help ensure that a business builds the appropriate thing in the right way and delivers worth to the market.
Source: Scaled Agile
Continuous Exploration:
This aspect of the continuous delivery pipeline pays attention to the creation of arrangements on what requires to be developed. In this aspect, teams use design thinking to ensure one thing. It is that the business comprehends the market issue or customer requirements. It helps businesses understand the remedy required to meet those requirements. It begins with a theory that will bring worth to customers. Teams expect that it happens in reply to market research or feedback from customers. Then, teams analyze the ideas and engage in further study. In turn, it becomes possible for the team to come to an idea of the thing required as a Minimum Marketable Feature or Minimum Viable Product.
As a result, they can get to know the presently available solutions and architecture that should be changed. At the end, the teams conclude by knowing the features and capabilities if put into practice have the probability to meet the market and customer needs. These are collectively explained and given priority in the Program Backlog.
Continuous Integration:
The attention of this aspect is on captivating features from the Program Backlog and executing them. Mainly, in this aspect, design thinking instruments are applied for refining the features. With this focus, teams can be motivated to engage in more research. They will be motivated to use the solution space tools. The Agile teams device the particular features after thoroughly understanding them. Once some works are completed, they are dedicated to version control. Then, teams combined them to a complete solution or system or built afresh. Also, teams do testing from top to bottom before they validate the solution in a performing atmosphere.
Continuous Deployment:
This aspect takes the modifications from the performing atmosphere. Then, it employs them in manufacturing. However, before deployment, teams evaluate them to ensure that they work properly. With this step, the features become available for the product. At this stage, a business can identify a suitable time to deliver them to end-users. With this element of the continuous delivery pipeline, businesses can roll back, respond or fix when required.
Release on Demand:
This aspect denotes the ability of a team to ensure worth available to customers. The team has the option to make all values available at the same time to customers. Otherwise, they have the option to make them available as and when the right time arrives based on business and market requirements. With this stage, businesses can get the chance to release at the optimal market time. Even, they get the chance to cautiously control the level of risk connected with every release. This aspect also includes crucial pipeline activities. These activities help with safeguarding the solidity and continuous worth of solutions. The aim should be to make sure that the value continues even long after the release.
Why is Continuous Delivery Important in SAFe?
Continuous Delivery in SAFe is the skill to get variations of all kinds. These variations can be anything like experiments, bug fixes, and configuration changes. Even, it can be the introduction of new features into the production. It can be for introducing these changes to the hands of end-users. Most importantly, it involves the delivery of these changes quickly and safely with sustainability.
The goal of CD in SAFe is to make deployments of any type routine and predictable. The deployment can be a change to a large-scale distributed system or an app. It should be done safely even if a business has a complex production environment. With a Continuous Delivery Pipeline, a company can achieve it by making sure that its code is always in a state of deployability. It aims at ensuring that it happens even in a company with thousands of Developers. It should happen smoothly even when thousands of Developers continue to make changes daily. This is why with CD it will be possible to eliminate the hardening, testing, and integration phases.
Why is Continuous Delivery Important?
Businesses engaged in software development always have an assumption. The assumption is that software deployment should happen more frequently. Also, they believe that they should be ready to accept lower levels of dependability and stability in their systems. But, studies show things differently. High-performance teams are consistently delivering services more dependably and quickly as well. This happens even in highly regulated domains like finance and government services. So, with this capability they can gain from CD, organizations can get a competitive advantage. With practices that are part of Continuous delivery, businesses can achieve many benefits like:
Releases with Low Risk:
The objective of Continuous Delivery in SAFe is to ensure effortless software deployments. Also, it aims at making deployments low-risk events that can be performed at any time as and when the demand arises.
Quicker Time to Market:
When it comes to the traditional software delivery lifecycle, it takes weeks and even months for the integration and testing/fixing phases. But, with Continuous Delivery, these phases can be eliminated. How? It is because teams can work together for automating the solution building and deployment process. Also, they can do this for regression testing and environment provisioning. It will be possible to avoid a large amount of re-work, which is common in the traditional delivery lifecycle.
Higher Quality:
With SAFe Continuous Delivery Pipeline, Developers will have automated tools. They help with the discovery of regressions within minutes. So, the teams get the liberty to pay attention to their efforts on higher-level testing activities and user research. As testing is done all through the delivery process, quality can be assured at each phase.
Conclusion:
Not only these benefits. Continuous delivery can bring other benefits like happier teams, better products, and lower costs to businesses. In every possible way, a business can see improvement in its operations with Continuous Delivery SAFe.
References:
- https://www.scaledagileframework.com/continuous-delivery-pipeline/
- https://www.atlassian.com/continuous-delivery/principles
- https://continuousdelivery.com/
- https://www.opsmx.com/what-is-continuous-delivery/
