Identityball

We have no confidence in the auth delivery team because it always takes them 6 or 7 tries to get it right.

That’s a real (painful) statement that I heard directly from a product owner working with a software delivery team that I was advising.

Delivering software is undeniably challenging. While some teams successfully deploy multiple times a day, others struggle to release once a quarter. What sets these teams apart, and how can a team improve?

The 2011 film Moneyball tells the story of Billy Beane, a baseball GM who used analytics to turn the Oakland Athletics into a competitive team. Beane's success wasn't about hitting home runs but about consistently "getting on base." This concept is just as powerful in software development, where structured release practices can help your team deliver reliable software more consistently.

The "Get on Base" Approach to Software Releases

Structured release practices are the “get on base” strategies for software development. They focus on reducing risk, ensuring quality, and building confidence with each deployment. This advice isn't just for delivery teams building software but can also be applied to teams that are delivering configurations in a commercial Software-as-a-Service platform (Saas). (think of your configurations like software).

Here’s how your team can adopt these practices:

1. Adopt Incremental Delivery with Feature Branching

Feature branching allows your team to work on new features in isolation, integrating them into the main codebase only when they are fully tested and ready. By delivering features incrementally, your team can release smaller, more manageable updates that reduce the risk of introducing bugs and make it easier to roll back if something goes wrong.

2. Implement Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD)

CI/CD automates the process of integrating code changes and deploying them to production. With continuous integration, every code change is automatically tested and integrated into the main codebase. Continuous deployment takes it a step further by automatically pushing those changes to production. This approach helps catch issues early, ensures that code is always in a deployable state, and allows your team to release updates more frequently and with greater confidence.

3. Practice Release Cadence Discipline

Establish a regular release cadence—whether it’s daily, weekly, or bi-weekly—and stick to it. A consistent release schedule creates predictability, allowing your team to plan, test, and release features in a controlled manner. This discipline helps the team build a rhythm and ensures that everyone is aligned with the release cycle.

4. Use Release Candidates and Phased Rollouts

Release candidates allow your team to thoroughly test a version of your software before it goes live. By using release branches and tagging release candidates, you can promote code through different environments (e.g., Dev, Test, Staging) and gather feedback at each stage. Phased rollouts can further reduce risk by gradually deploying updates to a small percentage of users before a full-scale release.

5. Conduct Regular Retrospectives and Post-Mortems

After each release, hold retrospectives to discuss what went well, what didn’t, and how the process can be improved. If issues arise during a release, conduct a post-mortem to analyze the root cause and identify actions to prevent similar problems in the future. These practices encourage continuous improvement and help the team refine their release process over time.

6. Emphasize Automation and Test Coverage

Automated testing is critical to maintaining release quality. Ensure that your CI/CD pipeline includes a comprehensive suite of automated tests—unit tests, integration tests, and end-to-end tests—to catch issues before they reach production. High test coverage gives your team the confidence to release more frequently, knowing that critical parts of the application are thoroughly tested.

7. Streamline Rollback Procedures

Even with the best practices, not every release will go perfectly. Having a streamlined rollback procedure is essential. Ensure that your team can quickly revert to a previous stable version if a release causes issues. This capability minimizes downtime and helps maintain trust with your users.

8. Foster a Culture of Accountability and Collaboration

Structured release practices require the entire team to be on the same page. Foster a culture where everyone is accountable for the quality of each release and where collaboration is encouraged. Regular communication, shared responsibility, and clear roles within the release process ensure that the team works together effectively.

9. Measure and Refine

Use metrics to track the success of your release practices. Metrics like deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, and mean time to recovery (MTTR) can provide insights into how well your team is performing. Regularly review these metrics and refine your release process to improve over time.

Build Confidence with Every Release

Just like in Moneyball, where success came from getting on base consistently, success in software development comes from consistently delivering reliable releases. By incorporating structured release practices, your team can improve its delivery performance, build confidence, and ultimately create a more stable and predictable release cycle.

If you got this far, thank you for taking the time to read this article. Keep in mind that this is not a "take this pill and you'll be better tomorrow" kind of approach. These strategies should be implemented in time and not necessarily all at once. You'll also need buy in from your delivery team as well as leadership.