How a Continuous Delivery Environment Became a Competitive Advantage
This is a story about the value of using a Continuous Delivery Environment to support your custom software development team’s efforts and how it became a competitive advantage for Third Wave Technology.
The Challenge of Custom Software Development Teams
As a boutique custom software development shop, we were proud of the experienced and talented software teams and agile software process we were able to provide to our clients. However, as consultants working on an hourly basis, the expectation of delivering quality software rapidly was high.
This is rightfully so. Complete professional software development teams are expensive. To ensure our clients see the constant value stream they demand, we deliver and demo working software to all our clients every 2 weeks. Needless to say, this is a lot of pressure.
This full level of transparency is an important part of the agile process. However, in the early days of our business we made the mistake of developing in some of our client’s environments. The affect on our productivity became immediately obvious and it clearly slowed us down.
This was a business lesson learned. Do not to put ourselves in a position where we cannot absolutely perform at our best. This is for the sake of our client’s expectations and our own reputation.
The main problem, in these cases, was that we were not working in the most efficient and productive environments. The team was forced to not use a completely automated Continuous Delivery Environment which was costing precious time and money.
Cloud Based Continuous Delivery Environment
In projects that were fully outsourced, we always set up our own Continuous Delivery Environment as the first stage of project. This ensures that the environment will efficiently support our fast moving agile process. However, setting up a new Continuous Delivery Environment can take a lot of time. While still worth the effort, there was overhead involved at the start of each new client project.
To solve this issue, we used Amazon Web Service (AWS) to accelerate and automate the setup of the Continuous Delivery Environment. This innovation greatly reduced the overhead, time and cost to our clients. The effort was a success and allowed our teams to consistently fulfill our mission: To rapidly deliver business value to our clients.
Continuous Delivery as a Competitive Advantage
Having solved this issue was a big benefit for our company and clients. It quickly became a competitive advantage. We were now able to guarantee that our professional agile software teams would deliver to our standards because they had the talent, process and environment under our control.
Very quickly, our clients began requesting our Continuous Delivery Environment for their own development teams. While this was not a part of our core business, we realized that the high demand for efficiency would make a great product. Thus was born a cloud based Continuous Delivery Environment we named Cloud CDE.
This story is not intended to be an advertisement. It was written to share the importance that every modern development team use a Continuous Delivery Environment. This point was really brought home as our own highly successful teams were held back when not utilizing Continuous Delivery.
Conclusion
If you have an internal development team and you are not utilizing a fully automated Continuous Delivery Environment, then you are holding your company back. I strongly encourage you to make Continuous Delivery, whether cloud based or internal, your competitive advantage too. Your client’s demand it, just as ours do, to stay competitive in an accelerated business world.
You may also be interested in: The Business Case for Cloud-based Continuous Delivery Environments
Third Wave is a boutique software development company located in Boca Raton, Florida. Our business acumen, agile development solutions, and perfected continuous development process offer unmatched levels of expertly crafted software and development services. Our team is dedicated to helping companies break into the new era of rapidly changing business trends with adaptive technology that provides sophisticated business solutions.
Third Wave also offers Cloud CDE, a fully automated cloud based Continuous Delivery Environment “in a box”. Cloud CDE and our consulting services provide a jump start to organizations that are ready to start transforming their culture to a high performing IT organization.