3 Simple steps to build your Continuous Delivery Dashboard

Continuous Delivery is gaining traction now, but it is never easy to get funding :-|| But using Lean Value Stream Maps you can now showcase tangible efficiency gains by following these 3 simple steps to build your Continuous Delivery dashboard.

In uncertain times, people always struggle with executive funding for resources (infrastructure asset purchases and/or dedicated people). This is where I have borrowed the Lean Value Stream maps (VSM) to showcase visible dashboards focused on process efficiency gains, resulting in hard $$$ savings, and help win executives approval, for funding the various activities under the Continuous Delivery initiatives.

Here is a basic definition for Continuous Delivery, which is a set of practices and  principles aimed at, building, testing and releasing software faster and more frequently. The practices would typically include configuration management, continuous integration, automated testing, deployment automation, build pipelines and an agile team delivering frequent releases.

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Continuous Testing: Building Agility at Scale

As organizations scale their agile efforts and work across distributed locations, integrate products across business units, and develop solutions with their partners and become suppliers, they are facing integration challenges at an even bigger scale.  I will be discussing some of the challenges and solutions in upcoming postings.

The worlds of testing, development and the operations teams had already been struggling to collaborate in the software industry (with or without agile) and only recently have been able to reconcile to some extent, led by aggressive ALM (application lifecycle management) vendors and the upcoming DevOps movements. But the sheer size of integration due to scale complexities has further exaggerated this problem !

But the agilistas have many  tools to beat this complexity and the challenges can be  overcome by combining these. Reflecting back and recognizing the power of available techniques -  from extreme programming methodologies to the power of automated testing -  the agile toolkit offers a heavenly state of "Continuous Testing", which allows the organization to reduce the costly integration errors and provide continuous visibility to the business stakeholders while maintaining continuous high quality benchmarks.

Continuous Testing is based on the integrated framework of continuous integration (build stage) and continuous delivery (deploy stage) pipelines, which allow the engineering teams to run multiple builds and deploy cycles per change (using a continuous integration server) and performing the testing activities in parallel, across the various application life-cycle stages. The term ‘continuous testing’ was coined in 2003, to run the tests continuously to enable rapid feedback, while the source code is being changed.

I will be discussing more on the details of Continuous Testing in my upcoming series. Keep watching this space....