Software innovation has fueled rapid changes in the business world. Over time, software innovation has transformed how companies develop, test, and release their business apps. For companies to retain their competitive advantage in today’s volatile IT marketplace, they must embrace digital business practices and become more adaptive and agile. Unfortunately, most software developers cannot keep pace with the customer demands. Optimizing your company’s software deployment process can improve your efficiency in delivering software at the speed that customers want. As a software developer, you could be wondering, “What is continuous delivery and how does it optimize my software deployment process?” Every software developer is unique and will have different constraints in software delivery. Below are the common causes of long leads in software deployment.
Approval Process
Approval processes ensure that software developers adhere to auditable standards and enable them to mitigate potential risks. However, the approval process within most companies is plagued with complexity and often comprises of a set of manual deployment processes. In fact, these manual processes use Microsoft office and email to track and manage software delivery. They must wait for people to approve software deployment. However, continuous software deployment increases the speed of software delivery and makes the approval process more rigorous. You could automate your software delivery process to reduce lead times.
Handoffs
Over time, software developers have strived to transition to product teams and eliminate their organizational silos. Often, these silos make it difficult for software developers to achieve the objective of continuous flow and short leads. Organizational silos are industrial artifacts designed to drive up lead times from one team to another. You require additional communication between team members for you to resolve ambiguities in your processes. The best way to reduce handoffs is to automate your processes and enable team members to work on increasing the flow and lower lead times.
Manual Software Delivery
Machines are far much efficient at software deployment than humans. Some software developers still deploy their code manually. Automating software deployment can be a game changer in your organization. Automation allows a company to deliver software rapidly without altering other processes. In fact, automation can help an organization to reduce lead times by over 90%. Automation increases the reliability and repeatability of a process. As such, it will take only a few seconds to deploy software to production units.
Testing Environment
Nothing is demoralizing than the software development team lacking a test environment to initiate a new release. Poor scheduling, lack of test environment, and manual processes can increase the cost of software deployment, create long lead times, and delay releases. One of the most repetitive tasks in software deployment is the creation of test environments. It should be automated and be made easier to control. Automated scheduling, tracking, and deployment process can drive down deployment costs and reduce lead times significantly. One of the best ways to reduce lead times is to automate your software testing process. As enterprises continue to adapt to new economic changes, the complexity of software deployment continues to increase. Automating and optimizing your software delivery processes will increase the pace of software delivery, improve the quality, and reduce lead times dramatically.