The Continuous Delivery Maturity Model

Some interpreted languages such as PHP do not require a build phase. By plotting where you and your team sit against each of the pillars, you can also identify any areas that need more investment to bring you up to par before you start progressing to the next stage. Finally, sharing a maturity model with business stakeholders will also help to set reasonable expectations and communicate the benefits derived from CI/CD without reaching expert levels. For example, if you’re new to CI/CD, the starting point is to ensure all your code is in source control, encourage everyone on the team to commit changes regularly, and start writing automated unit tests. Moving to beginner level, teams stabilize over projects and the organization has typically begun to remove boundaries by including test with development. Multiple backlogs are naturally consolidated into one per team and basic agile methods are adopted which gives stronger teams that share the pain when bad things happen.

• More likely is that some series of changes pushes them to a new level and they only recognize the transition in hindsight.
• Some interpreted languages such as PHP do not require a build phase.
• One way of accomplishing that is to have a separate stream or category of issues assigned to the DevOps teams in charge of infrastructure provisioning.
• Multiple processes are consolidated and all changes, bugs, new features, emergency fixes, etc, follow the same path to production.
• Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment are closely related, so I’ll refer to both as CD from now on for simplicity.
• Dev and ops teams share some responsibilities but still use separate tools.

Commonly each person integrates at least once per day giving place to several integrations during the day. Each integration should be verified by an automated Build Verification Test . These automated tests can detect errors just in time so they can be fixed before they create more problems in the future.

Continuous Delivery Model

Once again, the process for moving past this level is continuous, incremental improvement. The next step for project teams past this point is to begin to unite data from the operations team directly to conversations with customers. In this way, they can identify the minimum viable product for each feature. Those metrics should also become a direct part of the decision-making portfolio for upper management, meaning that they can make decisions with effective data to support their thinking. In this category we want to show the importance of handling this information correctly when adopting Continuous Delivery. Information must e.g. be concise, relevant and accessible at the right time to the right persons in order to obtain the full speed and flexibility possible with Continuous Delivery. Apart from information directly used to fulfill business requirements by developing and releasing features, it is also important to have access to information needed to measure the process itself and continuously improve it.

• Moving to intermediate the level of automation requires you to establish a common information model that standardizes the meaning of concepts and how they are connected.
• At this level the importance of applying version control to database changes will also reveal itself.
• To accomplish this you can install the Selenium app in Clarive.
• These build scripts should compile the source code into executable artifacts checking and validating syntax along the way.
• Automatic reporting and feedback on events is implemented and at this level it will also become natural to store historical reports connected to e.g. builds or other events.
• The application is built to be fully configurable and easily adaptable, by modifying the data file (js/data/data_radar.js).

When moving to beginner level you will naturally start to investigate ways of gradually automating the existing manual integration testing for faster feedback and more comprehensive regression tests. For accurate testing the component should be deployed and tested in a production like environment with all necessary dependencies. Expert practices will include zero touch continuous deployment to production where every commit can potentially make it all the way to production automatically. At expert level some organizations choose to make a bigger effort and form complete cross functional teams that can be completely autonomous. With extremely short cycle time and a mature delivery pipeline, such organizations have the confidence to adopt a strict roll-forward only strategy to production failures. At the intermediate level you will achieve more extended team collaboration when e.g. DBA, CM and Operations are beginning to be a part of the team or at least frequently consulted by the team.

Releases

Almost all testing is automated, also for non-functional requirements. Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment capabilities, together, represent the holy grail of modern software engineering. Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment are closely related, so I’ll refer to both as CD from now on for simplicity. What tools did you have in mind to “[…] provide dynamic self-service useful information and customized dashboards.” Well, this is the 3rd post in the same month, I didn’t do that for a long time! In short, changes at this level are ones of refinement, not tectonic shifts. The company might desire to transfer everything related to IT systems, including the core level, to CI/CD, DevOps, and Agile at once without having enough experience and knowledge.

It is also important to decide on an implementation strategy, you can e.g. start small using slack in the existing process to improve one thing at a time. However, from our experience you will have a better chance of a successful implementation if you jump start the journey with a dedicated project with a clear mandate and aggressive goals on e.g. reducing cycle time. Moving to intermediate the level of automation requires you to establish a common information model that standardizes the meaning of concepts and how they are connected. This model will typically give answers to questions like; what is a component?

Enterprise Agility

Currently, the CD Maturity Model data is stored in the js/data/data_radar.js file, as an array of JavaScript object literals. It would be very easy to convert the project to use a data source, such as a static JSON or YAML file, or MongoDB database. After making any javascript or css changes, optimize the project using RequireJS Optimizer. Optimizer combines related scripts together into build layers and minifies them via UglifyJS .

Instead of having a separate process, disaster recovery is simply done by pushing out the last release from the pipeline like any other release. This together with virtualization gives extreme flexibility in setting up test and production environments with minimum manual effort. Advanced practices include fully automatic acceptance tests and maybe also generating structured acceptance criteria directly from requirements with e.g. specification by example and domains specific languages. If you correlate test coverage with change traceability you can start practicing risk based testing for better value of manual exploratory testing.

Infrastructure as Code Maturity Model

One easy way to speed up feedback is by automating notifications so that teams are alerted to incidents or bugs when they happen. See how Atlassian’s Site Reliability Engineersdo incident managementand practice ChatOps for conversation-driven development. One small but impactful way to initiate culture change is to run workshops that identify areas of improvement between your dev & ops teams.

• DBA, CM and Operations are beginning to be a part of the team or at least frequently consulted by the team.
• Many commercial tools strive are kitchen sink solutions targeting large scale enterprise development.
• One small but impactful way to initiate culture change is to run workshops that identify areas of improvement between your dev & ops teams.
• Decisions are decentralized to the team and component ownership is defined which gives teams the ability to build in quality and to plan for sustainable product and process improvements.
• It can also be difficult to figure out how the team is progressing on this journey.

Building up your pipeline incrementally, with achievable goals along the way, makes the process more manageable and provides opportunities to take stock and learn from what you have done so far. At beginner level, you start to measure the process and track the metrics for a better understanding of where improvement is needed and if the expected results from improvements are obtained. A typical organization will have, at base level, started to prioritize work in backlogs, have some process defined which is rudimentarily documented and developers are practicing frequent commits into version control. The purpose of the maturity model is to highlight these five essential categories, and to give you an understanding of how mature your company is. Your assessment will give you a good base when planning the implementation of Continuous Delivery and help you identify initial actions that will give you the best and quickest effect from your efforts. The model will indicate which practices are essential, which should be considered advanced or expert and what is required to move from one level to the next. It’s important to make sure database changes be taken into consideration when releasing to production.

Build & Deploy

This Maturity Model aims to give structure and understanding to some of the key aspects you need to consider when adopting Continuous Delivery in your organization. Schedule a demo with one of our specialists and start improving your devops practices. One way of accomplishing that is to have a separate stream or category of issues assigned to the DevOps teams in charge of infrastructure provisioning. This will allow the testing each modification made in order to guarantee a good QA. Even the daily or weekly release of code will produce a report that will be sent every early morning. To accomplish this you can install the Selenium app in Clarive.