3 Major Continuous Delivery Hurdles Teams Need to Overcome
It’s almost staggering how fast software is today. If a team commits resources to transforming itself into a continuous institution, you can easily see teams deploying builds to production ten or more times a day where, previously, they might have only pushed things out once every six months.
Teams that leverage continuous delivery and continuous integration are playing an entirely different game than software teams of the past—instead of mapping out this major, ridged timeline, data is being both gathered and used more frequently (and effectively) than before.
But similar to test automation, DevOps, agile, and every other buzzword you hear within the industry, it isn’t as easy as flipping a switch and suddenly creating a continuous culture. It takes time, effort, and a smart game plan to adjust your strategy, and Jeff Morgan, the chief technology officer and cofounder of LeanDog, keyed in on three major hurdles in a recent interview at TechWell’s STAREAST 2017 conference.
He started by pointing out an obvious but critical component to the equation: You have to start producing very high-quality software.
“You can't push your software to production every few minutes, or once a day, or even once a week, if you have a lot of defects,” Morgan explained. “So we have to introduce the practices right away that drive the quality really high, and the practices that help us react quickly whenever we do make a mistake.”
The second hurdle is more focused on the environments you run the software in. In order to maximize your continuous delivery transformation, you need to have rigid consistency from the first test environment all the way to production. If you have variability, that will cause teams to have problems throughout the process that can slow you down.
Lastly, if you’re going to become continuous, you have to have a mindset shift. That will help you rethink your entire product.
“No longer do we have long roadmaps of product design, but instead, we have a lot of data we can collect now,” Morgan continued. “So we use that data to help us make those product decisions.”
Software is faster, so you need to create a culture within your team that allows you to match that speed. There will be some hurdles along the way, but if you’re looking to institute continuous delivery/continuous integration within your organization, you can get there with the right approach.
