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.


The DevOps MVP for More Frequent Releases 

More frequent releases require more technical discipline, more automation, and more risk remediation:

  1. Version control practices include feature flagging, branching, or other methods to enable deploying code but without allowing its use in production environments. 
  2. Application, database, user experience, and business process monitoring is updated with every release. The agile development process has steps and responsibilities defined that ensure monitoring is updated based on new or changed functionality.
  3. IaC (Infrastructure as Code) is in place to tear up and down environments to support testing.
  4. Robust automated testing is in place that can drive simple smoke tests to comprehensive end-to-end regression tests.
  5. Non-functional and security testing is also automated. Automated tests are not just validating APIs and performing functional testing, they are also testing for performance, security, and other non-functional acceptance criteria. 
  6. CI/CD automates all (or at least the most common) steps to integrate and deploy all code, database, and other technology changes into multiple environments.
  7. Rolling back failed releases, and the ability to roll back to a previous version of code is also implemented in CI/CD.

Next and last post in this series on how frequently should you really deploy code coming next week.

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About Isaac Sacolick

Isaac Sacolick is President of StarCIO, a technology leadership company that guides organizations on building digital transformation core competencies. He is the author of Digital Trailblazer and the Amazon bestseller Driving Digital and speaks about agile planning, devops, data science, product management, and other digital transformation best practices. Sacolick is a recognized top social CIO, a digital transformation influencer, and has over 900 articles published at InfoWorld, CIO.com, his blog Social, Agile, and Transformation, and other sites. You can find him sharing new insights @NYIke on Twitter, his Driving Digital Standup YouTube channel, or during the Coffee with Digital Trailblazers.