Level Up! A Continuous Deployment Maturity Model

A continuous integration pipeline capitalizes on investments in automation while starting to deliver tangible business benefits from DevOps culture. Instead of trying to retrofit infrastructure as code into the existing CD Maturity Model, I believe it is more effective to independently apply the model’s five levels of maturity to infrastructure as code. To that end, I have selected many of the best practices from the book, Infrastructure as Code, as well as from my experiences.

Often times these solutions create complications and bottlenecks for small projects that do not need to collaborate with 5000 developers and multiple product lines, or multiple versions. On the other hand some companies need greater central control over the build and release process across their enterprise development groups. Advanced practices include fully automatic acceptance tests and maybe also generating structured acceptance criteria directly from requirements with e.g. specification by example and domains specific languages. If you correlate test coverage with change traceability you can start practicing risk based testing for better value of manual exploratory testing. At the advanced level some organizations might also start looking at automating performance tests and security scans. A team at this level has integrated continuous improvement and the measurement of performance directly into their DNA.

These automated tests can detect errors just in time so they can be fixed before they create more problems in the future. This helps to reduce a lot of integration issues since this practice allows to develop faster and in a more efficient way. Senior developer and architect with experience in operations of large system.

What Is A Continuous Delivery Maturity Model?

Start reorganizing your teams, processes, and functions in a new way that is oriented towards the basic premise of DevOps – bringing Dev and Ops closer than ever before. Agile practices mature into Lean practicesfor even more business-focused workflows. Security updates are built into the product development workflow. Security staff support testing team as they integrate scans into regular processes.

• With very short cycle time and mature delivery pipeline, such companies have the confidence to adopt a stringent roll-forward only strategy to failures in production.
• If the operations team is too siloed, the engineering and project management teams find ways to break down those walls little by little, involving them earlier in the process.
• Jiani Zhang is President of the Alliance and Industrial Solution Unit at Persistent Systems.
• Health monitoring for applications and environments and proactive handling of problems.

To keep your application performing well, you need to track various metrics. The challenge of migrating COBOL applications to run in the cloud is made nearly impossible with tricky line-to-line conversions … Continuous delivery is for everyone, not just the DevOps elite. An earlier version of this process which you might want to have a look at was introduced by Chris Shayan, when he wrote about the Continuous Delivery maturity matrix below. Less than 10% of these people actually work with Continuous Delivery.

Continuous Integration, Delivery, Deployment And Maturity Model

So, if the entire CD process can launch with one command, why are there still two higher levels of CD maturity? Although testing is automated, many organizations are reluctant to cede control over the release to production, and, thus, might require a manual approval step before code gets promoted to the next stage of deployment. Testing illustrates the inherent continuous delivery maturity model overlap between continuous integration and continuous delivery; consistency demands that software passes acceptance tests before it is promoted to production. Test automation tools include pipeline software like Jenkins; test automation systems like Selenium or Cypress; and cloud services, including AWS CodePipeline or Microsoft Azure DevTest Labs.

There are many paths to take into this realm, we can approach from a tool perspective — how to choose the tool that is right for you. There are many open source and commercial tool offerings, each claiming to simplify the development team’s work while increasing confidence in the published artifacts. Project Managers need to weigh in the needs of the company against the various feature sets of these tools. Many commercial tools strive are kitchen sink solutions targeting large scale enterprise development.

It’s a path to the advanced capabilities befitting the DevOps major leaguers that deploy multiple times a day or even multiple times an hour. It might seem strange to state that verifying expected business result is an expert practice but this is actually something that is very rarely done as a natural part of the development and release process today. Verifying expected business value of changes becomes more natural when the organization, culture and tooling has reached a certain maturity level and feedback of relevant business metrics is fast and accessible. As an example the implementation of a new feature must also include a way to verify the expected business result by making sure the relevant metrics can be pulled or pushed from the application. The definition of done must also be extended from release to sometime later when business has analyzed the effects of the released feature or change.. At this level the work with modularization will evolve into identifying and breaking out modules into components that are self-contained and separately deployed.

To get to level 3, you need to implement well-defined automation and DevOps processes. Nowadays Terraform is one of the pioneer tools used to manage modern infrastructure. DevOps transformation, automation, data, and metrics are my preferred areas.

Groups of disparate, unrelated features are bundled together into big projects because releases are still a major event and customers won’t wait for another release. The concept of a minimum viable release is still foreign, and the result continues to be lengthy quality assurance and compliance timelines. While those teams are a part of the planning and design conversations, they’re not fully integrated. This means that QA and compliance still takes a significant amount of the time between when code is written and when it’s deployed. This level is where the hypothetical team that “does DevOps” by installing a Jenkins server lives.

However, this approach carries significant risk if adequate testing is not in place. To maintain a consistent release train, the team must automate test suites that verify software quality and use parallel deployment environments for software versions. Automation brings the CI/CD approach to unit tests, typically during the development stage and integration stage when all modules are brought together. The https://globalcloudteam.com/ lays out the five increasingly intense — and capable — levels of the process. GitOps has emerged as a key technology in the cloud native computing space over the last few years.

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Zihao Liu is perusing a Ph.D. degree in Information Processing Science at M3S Research Unit of the University of Oulu. Degree in Software, Systems and Services Development in the Global Environment from the University of Oulu Finland in 2018. His research interests contain empirical software engineering, software process improvement, Artificial intelligence , Internet of Things , and Virtual Reality. Field mobility solutions could significantly boost the profitability of a business while providing a source of competitive differentiation.

At first glance a typical mature delivery pipeline can be very overwhelming; depending on how mature the current build and deployment process is in the organization, the delivery pipeline can be more or less complex. In this category we will describe a logical maturity progression to give structure and understanding to the different parts and levels it includes. The design and architecture of your products and services will have an essential impact on your ability to adopt continuous delivery. If a system is built with continuous delivery principles and a rapid release mind set from the beginning, the journey will be much smoother.

Level 1: Select And Deploy

However, the goalposts of collaboration, automation, and an agile pipeline are not fixed but rather dynamic and continuous. With a well-charted DevOps maturity model, organizations can know where they are moving and why. They can also keep track of their progress while correcting their course if any digressions or interruptions occur. DevSecOps represents a trend, especially with government IT teams, where cybersecurity responsibilities are formally built into the processes.

Their process is well-defined, and everyone understands not only their role but also which steps to take to improve their performance in that role. Every day is a new opportunity to do things a little bit better. Being at this level can also lead to a feeling of frustration, as technical teams have far more metric data than management. That data might be difficult to access or challenging for management to understand, meaning that they make decisions organizational telemetry suggests will be worse for the business.

Youve Been Doing Business Process Documentation Wrong

Team reviews availability and performance alerts for improvement opportunities. Purists will say creating another department is the antithesis of the DevOps ethos. Some organizations need to stand up temporary working groups or task forces to steer DevOps practices through entrenched silos. The waterfall approach defines success by features and timelines rather than business outcomes. Many pre-DevOps software organizations become so accustomed to the limitations of their technology workflow, they may not even be aware of better ways of working.

What’s more, the way that the team manages projects can introduce problems for the organization. They plan everything, then code all of it, then go through painful rounds of QA and compliance approvals before the code is ready to go to the operations team. Many times, they’ll do all that only to find that operations needs the code changed again. Containers are a common runtime destination for CI/CD pipelines, and if they’re in use at this first stage of the continuous delivery maturity model, development teams have usually adopted Docker images defined by a Dockerfile. Continuous delivery implementations pass through phases of maturity. This five-phase continuous delivery maturity model borrows its structure from the CMM, progressing from a base level of no effective capability through beginner, intermediate, advanced and expert stages.

At this stage it will also be natural to start migrating scattered and ad-hoc managed application and runtime configuration into version control and treat it as part of the application just like any other code. When it comes to a maturity model for successful mobility deployments, the methodologies and principles of continuous delivery are quickly gaining recognition as a successful strategy for genuine business agility. For a lot of businesses, the question is no longer ‘why’, but ‘how’.

Agile practices take deeper root across development, operations, design, and business groups. Ops team stays ready and aware of forthcoming releases from development. The blue bar at the bottom summarizes the costs & benefits a company can expect to incur across these stages. It might be time to check in on how your teams are doing and identify areas for improvement. The tools and technology your teams use can drive better automation and collaboration between teams.

We believe there are four fundamental areas that organizations should focus on when adopting DevOps. They are culture and organization, CI/CD, testing, and architecture. We see many organizations that focus primarily on CI/CD and automation, but without the right culture, architecture, and testing practices, these organizations will never get the full benefits of DevOps. The vast majority of SaaS solutions follow the GitHub model and you can test your open source projects free of charge. Some open source projects do require a lot of control over the build infrastructure though as they might be testing parts of an operating system not accessible in a hosted solution. In this case any of the existing open source CI servers should do a good job, although with added necessary maintenance overhead.

Junit Tutorial For Unit Testing

The list of processes below represents an extremely high level of maturity in your continuous testing capabilities and will ensure you are achieving the maximum value DevOps can offer. We also share a client’s story and how we assisted them in maturing their DevOps practices. In a mature DevOps ecosystem, the boundaries between development and testing are eliminated. You should have a dedicated test environment for every product, and your testing should be automated. You also need to continuously analyze and validate your test coverage, and regularly carry out risk analyses to ensure you’re not leaving any gaps.

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Finally, sharing a maturity model with business stakeholders will also help to set reasonable expectations and communicate the benefits derived from CI/CD without reaching expert levels. At this stage it might also become necessary to scale out the build to multiple machines for parallel processing and for specific target environments. Techniques for zero downtime deploys can be important to include in the automated process to gain better flexibility and to reduce risk and cost when releasing. At this level you might also explore techniques to automate the trailing part of more complex database changes and database migrations to completely avoid manual routines for database updates.

It’s not just that, either; they can say by how much and over what time windows. The product team makes decisions about what features to prioritize based on hard data and conversations with key customers. Using the DevOps maturity model, you can identify your organization’s strengths and weaknesses and focus your training on key areas that need improvement, allowing you to more easily advance to the next level. Before diving into the levels of the DevOps maturity model, let’s examine the key tenets of DevOps that all mature organizations have in common, so you can better gauge where you stand. You should focus on setting up a simple continuous integration process as early as possible.

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Observability allows teams to actively analyze and debug production applications as they monitor. Soak tests anticipate product performance in real world situations before deployment. A culture of continuous improvement sustains momentum for ongoing advancement. Self-service environment automation invites engineers to deploy the infrastructure they need when they need it. Security scans are integrated into testing protocols throughout the dev process, not just at deployment. Most infrastructure is automated so provisioning is repeatable and reliable, opening up possibilities for more frequent reliable deployments.

The concept was a major driver in the first ML Ops maturity model article. The objective of the CMMI project was to develop a model for the evaluation of an organizations process maturity. Furthermore, the CMMI model was intended to act as a guide to develop and improve processes that meet business goals.