Why should I invest in continuous delivery?
This is a very common question that we get asked by our business stakeholders who are trying to justify the additional spend in their project budget to implement continuous delivery.
A big part of the correct answer is explaining the business value and return on investment of an agile and modern application lifecycle management compared to classic or traditional processes and approach.
The benefits
Can be spread across a few business impact centers: Time, Cost, Quality, Risk, and Governance
Benefits of Continuous Delivery
Shorter time to market
Continuous delivery uses automation heavily during the development and release activities of the software development lifecycle (SDLC), which is truly an incredible time saver.
Less time spent in repeated tasks by your development team also means less costs spent over the long run.
Better quality
Continuous integration (CI) increases software quality by automating different types of testing such as unit, integration, behaviour, and performance tests among other types. Also CI tools can proactively monitor and report quality metrics such as test coverage changes.
QA starts to gain more visibility and priority as the CI tools make reports easily accessible. Highlighting any QA issues early on during the development process.
Reduced Risk
Deploying software to production is associated with high risk. mostly an anxious and painful event to involved teams. And it could become catastrophic.
The human error plays a big factor of associated risk. Not to mention lack of trust for recovery and rollback plans (plan B) that are not updated, nor tested frequently enough to validate they are still reliable.
“If It Hurts, Do It More Frequently, and Bring the Pain Forward” – David Farley
Faster Recovery
Disaster recovery (Plan B, essentially) of any software release is important critical to any business. An unexpected problem or anomaly in a software release could result in lost revenue and/or customers. Not to mention the PR nightmare if your software is popular.
If you are an independent software vendor (ISV) building and selling software, your customers will be checking your service level agreement (SLA). Better SLA means the software is trusted to operate with a certain level of reliability and availability.
An up-time guarantee of 99.99% means you have less than 1:05 minutes per month to perform any maintenance, including updates and releases.
Less Governance Overhead
Change evaluation & control, configuration management, and audits for software release and deployment is an important part of governance in ITIL. Having the tools to automate these processes is important to reduce waste while maintaining the same process.
Most modern release management tools provide the tools to design a complying release and deployment process by offering the following features
- Audit environment and configuration changes
- Fine-grain permissions per application and environment and task
- Manual Interventions and approvals as a first-class citizen in the deployment process
- Rolling deployments and health checks
Summary
Through continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD) business will reduce (if not eliminate) the process waste of repeated tasks in each iteration/sprint and increase efficiency. Also it reduce risk of failed deployments by offering faster recovery and rollback. And it automates most of the governance tasks that are mostly performed manually.
Our Track Record
We have helped many businesses transition from the traditional approach to application lifecycle management and it often results in huge productivity boost for the teams and for the business overall. Tasks that took them days are now taking minutes and are performed automatically and painlessly faster.
If your project or organisation is researching or considering a change to a better process and tools in application lifecycle management. We would love to help. simple contact us.
