Continuous Delivery Pipeline – Scaling Agile Practice

Scaled Agile Framework, SAFe® is the world's leading framework for Business Agility. SAFe® is built around seven Core Competencies with Customers as a focal point in the center. The seven core competencies each have three dimensions making it a total of twenty-one dimensions to enable Business Agility. These dimensions contain some of the practices, patterns, and guidelines to Scale Agility across the enterprise.

DevOps and the Continuous Delivery Pipeline

One of the Dimensions of Agile Product Delivery is a core competency. DevOps is a mindset, a culture, and a set of technical practices. DevOps is a combination of two words, Development and Operation, indicating the ability to achieve speed and stability. DevOps makes continuous delivery possible. To survive and thrive through digital disruption, organizations should master the mindset and technical practices of DevOps. DevOps enables the Continuous Delivery Pipeline or CDP.

Continuous Delivery Pipeline

Continuous Delivery Pipeline represents the workflows, activities, and automation needed to move from ideation to release of value to the customer. Scaled Agile Framework, SAFe® elaborates this process with four aspects, namely:

• Continuous Exploration (CE)
• Continuous Integration (CI)
• Continuous Deployment (CD)
• Release on Demand

The first three elements of the pipeline work together to support the delivery of small batches of functionality, which are then released according to the market demand/business need.

READ MORE: Top 5 scaling Agile Practice that Improves Business

Continuous Exploration

Fostering innovation and building alignment is the first step in the Continuous Delivery pipeline. Design Thinking is used to continually explore market and customer needs and define a Vision, Roadmap, and a set of Features for a Solution that addresses those needs.

Product Managers, Business owners, and System Architects, along with any subject matter experts as required, raise new ideas, refine them and prepare a list of prioritized features in the Program Backlog. These backlog items are then prioritized using Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF). They are pulled into implementation during PI Planning, which begins the continuous integration process.

Continuous Integration

Building quality into the development process by continuously integrating many Agile teams' ongoing work is the second aspect of the Continuous Delivery Pipeline. Some of the practices we follow are version control, Test Driven Development, Behaviour Driven Development, and Test Automation.

The outcome is a new functionality built and integrated frequently into a whole system or solution. The recommendation is to validate in a suitable staging environment that ranges from pure cloud-based software systems to physical devices and/or device simulators. This validation helps in using a production/production-like environment with the right configurations and correct data.

Continuous Deployment

It’s the aspect of capturing the processes associated with moving solutions through staging into production environments. As with Continuous Integration, this varies substantially based on the kinds of solutions created and their associated solution context. To ensure solutions are ready for a full release to customers, the deployment includes monitoring to provide flexibility in controlling releases, rolling back a release, or deploying incremental updates and patches.

Release on Demand

The ability to make value available to customers all at once, or in an ad hoc fashion based on market and business needs is the last aspect of the Continuous Delivery Pipeline. Release on Demand is central to Business Agility, as the decisions of what to release to whom and when are key value drivers.

End Note

So If you’re looking for a career change or are just looking to understand more about the field, DevOps certification may be just what you need! There are a lot of benefits of DevOps foundation certifications. We hope this blog has helped you understand how can you scale agile practices to improve businesses. Good luck with your DevOps adventure!