7 Required DevOps Practices Before Increasing Deployment Frequencies

In my last post, I shared 7 Prerequisites on Whether to Improve Deployment Frequencies with DevOps. I firmly believe that CI/CD is not enough to support stable releases and also shared 5 pre-deployment priorities for Agile DevOps teams.

Let’s now talk about the technical practices that underpin and are required for more frequent deployments. If your goal is to increase the frequency of releases, here is my POV on DevOps practices that are necessary before agile teams should even consider cranking the speed knob.

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7 Prerequisites on Whether to Improve Deployment Frequencies with DevOps

In my last post, I advised that having CI/CD automation is very important to drive frequent and reliable releases, however, it is not a sufficient process or steps to establish responsible releases. When you’re making a production release of an application or service, it requires communication, additional testing, documentation, and other steps that go beyond the scope of what continuous integration and deployment automate.

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CI/CD is not Enough! 5 Pre-Deployment Priorities for Agile DevOps Teams

Having CI/CD pipelines doesn't mean that continuous delivery is a business need or a good idea. I wrote about this a couple of years ago when I asked, "Is Continuous Delivery Right for Your Business?"

I know this is a debated topic. Yes, you can use feature flags or branching strategies to enable very frequent releases with controls that block new code from impacting customers. Yes, smaller releases are generally lower risk than larger ones. And yes, given two extremes, customers and end-users generally prefer more frequent releases and not waiting eons for improvements and bug fixes.

Bare with me and let's leave the debate aside.

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Episode 2 @DrivingDig Tip of the Day: Agile Planning, Development, and Culture

As I am celebrating the launch of StarCIO Agile Planning, this month's @DrivingDig tweets are a mix of some of my early and best posts on agile development and planning.

You'll see some themes in these posts. How to collaborate with product owners; Addressing technical debt (along with all the other priorities), moving beyond "project" to "products and programs, and addressing architecture and QA in agile are some of the Driving Digital tips.

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Agile Planning: Leverage Customer Feedback and Usage Data

The happy path of agile planning is around breaking down features and releasing them.

The required path is to itemize technical debt, business and technical operational needs, and compliance requirements into the plan and ensuring some of this work gets prioritized.

But many organizations leave our one crucial element of prioritization.

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15 Reasons Why StarCIO Agile Planning Drives Results!

I have been introducing different aspects of StarCIO Agile Planning. Last week I shared how continuous planning is used to deliver solid roadmaps. Prior to that, I posted on how StarCIO Agile Planning drives architecture standards and developing great products!

Get the white paper! This week I published a first white paper titled StarCIO Agile Planning: The Missing Practices to Gain Alignment and Achieve Great Results. I'm offering free 30-minute consultations to the first people who sign up for the paper and request to be contacted!

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Agile Continuous Planning to Deliver Solid Roadmaps

Agile teams can't wait till the end of a release to begin planning the next one. The time gap it creates is a tremendous loss of productivity. Furthermore, this approach to planning doesn't simplify drafting roadmaps and forecasts that many organizations require from their agile teams.

And while there are many benefits from the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), its Program Increment (PI) planning may not be suitable for many smaller and medium-sized development organizations. PI prescribes dedicating an innovation and planning iteration and scheduling two full days for the planning meeting. This may be a practical way to align and plan an agile release train for large development organizations that dedicate themselves to all the rigors of SAFe. It also promotes other activities like learning during this sprint.

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