How To Encompass Continuous Delivery Like The JEDIs

In today’s world, time is the most critical and valuable entity. If you get your timing right, the product or service could do wonder for your business. That’s the sole reason why most of the organizations are trying to launch the products quickly, and then provide frequent updates to remain competitive.

Thus, for every organization, it has become pivotal to keep all the processes and supply chain – moving at a very fast and coordinated pace. These, continuous series of workflow and tasks which are both manual and/or automated, represent a working line – known as Continuous Delivery Pipeline (CDP or CI/CD). As Scaled Agile framework (SAFe) suggests, the whole purpose of such a pipeline is to release something which has a value for the end user.

In the SAFe world, the Continuous Delivery Pipeline has four vital phases – Continuous Exploration, Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment, and followed by the Release on Demand - which is releasing the feature(s) to whole of the application’s customer base, i.e. the production release.

Since every decision is around the value being generated for the end user, customer’s perspective becomes core for everything. To ascertain the needs of customer, the organization MUST listen to the customer sentiments and feedback – which are critical for the on-going and future work.

How do we really align with CDP?

To answer this, we first ask, “what do we do with the feedback?”.

This is where Continuous Exploration is cardinal. From the feedbacks, the organization understands the customer’s pain areas, and plans to resolve them at the earliest – based on the criticality and value preposition, and other factors. Other important input for the organization is the market research, which helps build the roadmap for the next 3-6 months.

The brainstorming of these inputs leads to idea generation, that is based on a hypothesis to create value for the customer. Once a comprehensive list of ideas is available, the team collaborates to refine and prioritize the list of ideas/features to be taken up.

We, the JEDI, have a scorecard which has a list of all the features we intend to deliver overtime. ?We collaborate with the stakeholders and review this document routinely. This helps us to refine our plan and select the critical items for upcoming sprint.

The stories are identified for development and critical information like benefit hypothesis and acceptance criteria is updated. The prioritized and refined list help us in creating short to medium term roadmap.

Since we work in a very dynamic environment, we refrain from planning too much ahead in time.

On a continuous basis, the plan and stories are reviewed, refined, and prioritized. These stories are then picked up by the designers, developers, and testers who ensure the completeness of the requirements and the usability for the end user. At any time, a member can come up with a query or a suggestion, if there is a better way of doing things or if the experience does not seem impactful.

We believe in doing right for the customer and are always open to feedbacks, from everyone associated. This process of passing work items between designers to developers to tester happens on a continuous basis, with the expectation that at the end of the cycle the work is ready to be handed over to the clients for validation.

This churn is continuous and is part of Continuous Integration, where every work item is integrated with the previously deployed item – to ensure the system as a whole works correctly.

Once a unit of work is complete, and ready to be handed over – it is deployed to a segment of the traffic based on the hypothesis and business needs. Then, the analysis is done on the data collected in real time and the details are shared with the team. However, in case of an unlikely issue either a resolution is provided quickly by the team, or the item is taken down to be pushed later.

This agility helps in reducing the business impact. This Continuous Deployment cycle helps us in testing out our hypothesis and learning a great deal about the needs and wants of the customer – something which is of some value to them.

Now, most of the work is done by this time. Based on the inputs from the team (analysis) and data collected, the team gathers to decide if the deployed work item reached its significance. If it did, then we declare it as a positive experiment.

Otherwise, we would learn from it and use the learning for the next iteration of the work. The positive items are integrated and released to the production, as deemed fit by the product management team – completing the cycle of Release on Demand.

Following an agile way of working, from hypothesis to be production ready, there are workflows, tools and processes which enable us to continuously deliver value to the clients and customers.

We, the JEDI, are always exploring new and listed ideas, develop them to be valuable and usable, and test them against the hypothesis, to either launch the enhancement for every end user to benefit, or to learn and adjust our strategy to make it more apt – while keeping the focus on generating value for the customers at all the time.

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