Three Reasons Your Continuous Delivery Environment Will Fail

 In Continuous Delivery Environment

The agile software methodology brings tremendous improvements to software processes; however, many supporting development environments have not evolved with it. Many organizations are struggling with their environments because they were not designed to fully support the agile principles and the practices necessary to properly execute it. So, what is the solution? A Continuous Delivery Environment.

A Continuous Delivery Environment automates the following to support agile software practices:

  • Build
  • Test
  • Deployment Process

This allows software teams to routinely merge code into version control, and trigger automatic builds and tests that allow them to receive instant notifications if the build breaks.

While the Continuous Delivery Environment breakthrough has sparked an exciting DevOps revolution over the last 5 years, there are still common pitfalls that can plunder the success of your Continuous Delivery Environment. Here are three of them.

 

1. Your Environment

In order to fully automate your environment the design of your architecture must take the Continuous Delivery Environment into consideration. Any solid software architect will take a lot of factors into consideration when architecting software systems including ease of maintenance, scalability, flexibility, coupling to other systems and a lot more.

However, build, test and deployment automation are often not fully considered in the upfront design. Fortunately, new frameworks and release management tools are now available that help solve these problems by forcing the architect to think about these important considerations and making them easier to implement. Once these methods are standardized and automated across the entire team the process begins to become an afterthought which is the benefit of DevOps thinking.

For example, pairing Physique with Fluent Migrator creates a great developer workflow for managing databases as a part of your build.

 

2. Your Environment Configuration

A Continuous Delivery Environment isn’t simple to setup and configure. The complexity is in the following:

  • The availability of numerous tools and their compatibility with a given environment.
  • The scripting that glues the components together and facilitates automation. Scripting also requires specialized understanding in connecting the various tools.

This becomes a trade off in time in regard to building a fully automated Continuous Delivery Environment and working on other priorities. In many companies, this is often a side project that is low priority and frequently abandoned or never fully implemented.

Unfortunately, this requires a complete commitment to build the environment and the culture needed to make it a part of daily life. In other words, either fully commit a knowledgeable expert or team to make it happen whether that is an internal resource or experienced consultant.

 

3. Your Culture

The agile software process and a Continuous Delivery Environment are strong allies in increasing team productivity; however, there is one more critical piece that brings it all together. A high performance IT team that embraces the Continuous Delivery culture. This involves the entire process, including the:

  • Continuous Delivery Environment
  • Best practices
  • Communication
  • Collaboration

This culture routinely deploys new features or changes, identifies and removes roadblocks, and adds business value on a daily basis. They key to a successful Continuous Delivery Environment is a team that adopts the culture of constant change and IT evolution to attain business goals.

You will find this to be the most difficult challenge. This requires:

  1. A well-built automated Continuous Delivery Environment that works seamlessly.
  2. Proper training in the principles, tools and best practices of Continuous Delivery and agile software methodology.
  3. Strong leaders who are experienced in using Continuous Delivery who can continue to show the value and reinforce the message. (Once again whether that is an internal resource or an expert brought from the outside.)
  4. A vision for the long term benefits a high performing IT team can have on an organization.

Without these critical elements your efforts are likely to fail and people will go back to doing things “the old way” because it is comfortable and familiar. Continuous Delivery is not just about tools and techniques but principles and an overall philosophy.

 

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 expert 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.

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