How can you ensure that your continuous delivery strategy is transparent and collaborative?

Transparency fosters trust and collaboration. Once you've defined your goals and metrics, communicate them clearly to your entire team, stakeholders, and even your customers. This shared roadmap ensures everyone understands the destination and their role in reaching it.

Telemetry in your delivery of features every sprint is of utmost importance. How else will your sprint/SCRUM team know how they are progressing w.r.t their sprint goals. Scaled Agile is a great way to incorporate Quality in your sprints. Redefine Definition of Done - no Tech debt! MosCow - Must-Should-Could-Won't - prioritize to reduce fatigue and re-work. Invest in INVEST - Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Small, Testable. Planning Poker, I could go on...Bottom-line is if things like these, like automating your test cases is not part of your sprint goals and part of the SCRUM team's psyche, etc. the purpose is defeated.

Version-controlled software keeps track of every modification to the code in a database. If a mistake is made, developers can go back and compare earlier versions of the code to help fix the mistake while minimizing disruption to all team members. For instance, Visual Studio provides the flexibility to use Git for distributed version control. Developers can add their code to Git and GitHub with a single click by creating a new GitHub repository and compare lines by using new features to accept all changes with a single click. All while working in real-time. Four-eye principle enforced also helps save a lot of re-work and embarrassment during the sprint demo and then during the retrospective.

Just like blueprints undergo revisions before construction, code reviews ensure quality and reliability. Implement a code review process where developers meticulously examine each other's work. This shared scrutiny fosters a culture of learning and collaboration, identifying potential issues early on and promoting the exchange of best practices.

I can't emphasize the importance of automating your test cases. Meet the primary objective of delivering bug-free code to the client! Wasn't that how we get paid? How does it benefit? Save time, for starters, predict the quality of your code. Quality-assure the code quality. Improve test coverage. This is a building-block for designing, executing, and validating tests. How do we prioritize? Make a scorecard - list your success factors - set a criteria. Unit testing should definitely be top priority, followed by integration testing and functional testing. Automating testing, can also take over these monotonous, time-consuming tasks such as regression testing.

The Daily Stand-up - great place to discuss blockers and for feedback-looping. The SCRUM Team anyways works collaboratively - thus feedback on the work getting done has to be baked-in. The team is a pyramid so the ones with the tech skills help the ones that are learning and thus continuously feedback-looping on code quality, writing test cases, process/tools, etc. Before the sprint demo, get the Team Leads to review the code. Identify areas of improv, accelerate the dev lifecyle, build the highest quality code - all benefits of continuous feedback-looping. Constant comms within teams is an imperative. Holding each other accountable and to the highest standards is a key task of the team ensuring code quality.

Build a culture of shared responsibility, transparency, and faster feedback, which can then become the foundation of every high-performing DevOps team. According to Amazon, DevOps is a combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity: evolving and improving products at a faster pace than organizations using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes. It is also a union of people/processes/products to deliver value to customers. The DORA “2019 State of DevOps” report says that highly aligned teams deploy 208 times more frequently & 106 times faster than low-performing teams.

Continuous deployment is only made possible through automation and progression through environments. This is why it’s not just about CD but also continuous integration (CI), hence CI/CD The more automated the better, however, for certain deployments to production you can still always have gates which may, or may not be, automated. Visibility of where things sit in the cycle is also very important, choosing a tool that provides this is crucial