SAFe Wednesday 7 - SAFe CDP

Hi Learners,

So far I have,

1. Explained SAFe overview.
2. Explained Metrics supported by SAFe.
3. Explained what Planning Interval (PI) is.
4. Explained how and what happens in a PI Planning event
5. Explained what an ART is.
6. Explained how to prioritize and estimate the work using WSFJ.

My apologies that I missed my article last week. But, will be continuing my streak from now on.

Now that we have established all the necessary parameters required to identify and prioritize the work, we will now understand the actual track upon which the entire SAFe programs would run. It is called Continuous Delivery Pipeline (CDP. I will be using the acronym for rest of the article).

In very simple language, you can visualize CDP as the railway tracks upon which the huge, long, stylish railway engines travel, carrying passengers, goods and what not. A CDP acts like those railway tracks which ensures that the work is identified and processed CONTINUOUSLY.

CDP is also the architecture enabled by Architectural Runway and DevOps required to ensure smooth transition of work from exploration of problem/work to building the solution to deployment and delivery of that solution. This architecture will be ever evolving.

Definition of CDP: It represents all the necessary workflows, activities and automations needed to guide any kind of functionalities from inception to execution.

Each ART builds and maintains, or shares, a pipeline with assets and technologies needed to delivery solution/value as early as possible.

CDP enables ART to delivery new functionalities far more frequently than traditional processes.

Continuous can mean, daily, weekly or monthly depending upon the market demand. Few teams may releases multiple times in a day.

Eliminating the need for monolithic releases can improve Business Agility. This can be achieved by CDP where you allow the delivery of solution components in response to frequent market changes.

CDP contains 4 important elements that makes it an effective pipeline of value delivery.

1. CONTINUOUS EXPLORATION (CE): Focuses on creating alignment on what needs to be built.
2. CONTINUOUS INTEGRATION (CI): Focuses on taking features from ART backlog and implementing them.
3. CONTINUOUS DEPLOYMENT (CD): Takes changes from Staging environment and deploys to production.
4. RELEASE ON DEMAND (RoD): Ability to make VALUE available to customers either in an integrated or individual manner based on market and business needs.

(Will cover these 4 elements in the next article.)

Although CDP appears sequential in nature, the approach or application isn't truly linear. In true sense CDP enables a learning cycle allowing teams to establish hypothesis, build a solution and learn from it. Then you do this continuously.

For example:

A single feature enters a value stream sequentially, but teams will work through all aspects of that feature in parallel allowing the teams to, continuously

1. Explore User Value. (Continuous Exploration)
2. Integrate and demo that value. (Continuous Integration)
3. Continuously deploy the value to production. (Continuous Deployment)
4. Release that value whenever business needs it. (Release on Demand)

How to create a CDP?

START BY MAPPING CURRENT WORKFLO:

Workflows might be existing in your organization is it helping value flow without any interruption?

Eg: Below is how the organization has mapped its workflow or Value Stream

ALIGN THE CURRENT WORKFLOW TO CDP:

Identify which parts of your current workflow falls under the CE, CI, CD and RoD elements of CDP.

Eg: Below is how you can map the workflow to CDP

IDENTIFY OPPORTUNITIES FOR IMPROVEMENT:

Teams should constantly strive to improving the efficiency of each step and ultimately trying to reduce the end-to-end flow time.

TRACKING CONTINUOUS DELIVERY:

Visualizing and tracking the entire workflow will allow significant visibility of the work to respective stakeholders. An ART kanban board can help with it.

Below is an example of the board.

ENABLE CONTINUOUS DELIVERY PIPELINE WITH DEVOPS:

CDP can be best implemented with DevOps as building, maintaining and optimizing a CDP requires multiple tools and skills throughout the Value Stream.

DevOps helps in achieving high degree of cross-functional collaboration and short learning loops in a complex environment for rapid delivery of complex solutions.

For more information on Continuous Delivery Pipeline and how to implement it further please follow below link from Scaled Agile, Inc.

https://scaledagileframework.com/continuous-delivery-pipeline/

Signing off for the day.

Your Humble Pirate

Vikram Kanse