In the world of software development, speed is everything. If you don't deliver fast enough, you can't compete. The persistent question is, how can my organization truly achieve software delivery at speed and scale? Our answer: with Modern Software Delivery.
Businesses must keep pace with their competitive markets to remain viable. Every organization faces challenges from traditional competitors and new attack vectors to standard innovation and technology disruptors. The ease, availability and ubiquity of technology magnify the frequency and scope of these challenges.
Meanwhile, today's customers (and employees) are accustomed to highly available applications, constantly functional and consumable anywhere, anytime and on any platform. These forces are causing businesses to constantly re-evaluate their strategies to gain, control and manage their markets. Unfortunately, the way most software and technology is delivered is insufficient to meet these demands. There is a myriad of internal reasons why IT struggles to keep pace:- Technical debt is a drag on velocity and increases overall ownership costs
- Monolithic systems, by design, impede agility
- Teams are underdeveloped — they are forced together, resulting in poor productivity
- Long business-case funding and approval cycles bring innovation to a standstill.
Chapters
The Three Waves of Software Development Modernization
A Holistic, End-to-End View of Software (Product) Development
How You Can Tell if You Suffer From a Traditional IT Value Chain
Better, Faster and More Predictable: A Modern Software Delivery (MSD) Approach
Ensuring Quality Across the Value Delivery Chain
Outcomes, Not Activity – Metrics for Success
Conclusion
The Three Waves of Software Development Modernization
Agile adoption and Development Operations (DevOps) have addressed some of these software delivery challenges, but only in isolation. The massive uptake in the adoption of Agile methodologies -- which focus on better integrating the business and IT functions -- was the first wave of modernization.The First Wave of Modernization
In this first wave, organizations were transformed into collaborative and cross-functional teams, helping them improve transparency and provide some adaptability. However, teams did little to accelerate overall delivery velocity. Some organizations experienced longer-term velocity uplift benefits, while others only experience a shorter time for the first feature to market. In fact, according to the 2018 Standish Chaos Report and 13th Annual State of Agile Report, 52 percent of all Agile projects are considered challenged, while another 9 percent outright fail to achieve their cost or overall timeline objectives.The Second Wave of Modernization
The second wave of modernization began with the advent of DevOps. With DevOps, we saw principles of Design Thinking, Lean and Flow taking hold in the form of automation – specifically, automation pipelines. Generally, hyper-focus has been on automating specific segments of the overall delivery process, such as CI Builds. But this runs counter to Lean thinking, in which optimizing Flow is the goal. Without addressing the ability to introduce change and size of work, there is a practical limit to how much performance automation can deliver on its own.The Third Wave of Modernization
In the third wave of modernization, truly effective organizations modernize how they envision, develop, deliver and operate software within the application lifecycle. They transform themselves into collaborative, cross-functional, highly automated, innovative, self-managed, self-serviceable, and productive teams by adopting modern practices such as Value Stream Mapping, Design Thinking, Lean, cross-organizational DevOps, and Lean Agile. The synergy of these multiple modernization approaches represents the third wave of modernization. Organizations that modeled these proven principles have realized true business value, as seen in improved profitability, productivity and market share. In fact, many organizations that embody these principles see their market share grow by 50 percent more than their peers, per the State of DevOps Report 2017 and DORA State of DevOps Report 2018. When software development is the center of a business's strategy, that organization must establish an IT value chain that allows it to stay ahead of the competition by continuously delivering high-quality products at scale and low risk. This blog will describe how modern software delivery (MSD) organizations structure and further integrate their end-to-end software delivery processes. [cta bg="purple" button="Read Our White Paper" link="https://go.centricconsulting.com/BSC-FY19-11-CTNT-RBTWhitepaperMSDFocus_LandingPage.html"]For a deeper understanding of MSD and how we can help your company check out our white paper, Rethinking Business Transformation: Thrive Through Disruption with Modern Software Delivery.[/cta]A Holistic, End-to-End View of Software (Product) Development
MSD approaches focus on the entire IT value chain, with IT delivery being a system that includes ideation, development, delivery, and operations. What IT professionals do in one area greatly affects what they can do in other areas. Feedback loops are not only necessary for collaboration — they are a natural consequence of any system. [caption id="attachment_32467" align="aligncenter" width="800"]
Figure 1: The Modern Software Delivery Pipeline[/caption]
Figure 1 illustrates the typical components of a modern software delivery organization. All work starts with ideation from the business. Agile management starts by collecting ideas, vetting them, and converting them into a product vision, roadmap, themes and epics.
This work leads to development activities, where Agile teams break epics down into stories and acceptance criteria. Coupled with modular architecture, infrastructure as code, this decomposition of work into the smallest possible units allows an organization to optimize flow and reduce the risk of changes.
MSD's Holy Grail is the continual flow of "develop a feature, release a feature" in rapid succession. From this point, DevOps automation takes over in the form of continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery (CD), continuous testing (CT) and continuous deployment.
Each of these phases is responsible for building the software, validating it, packaging it for release, and then managing the release of each feature. Automation drives overall velocity, but only when features are small and decoupled. You need sophisticated infrastructure, security and governance to accelerate and achieve optimal velocity at scale and with quality. While this flow looks linear, it is a complex interdependence on multiple organizational capabilities, as outlined in Figure 2 below:
[caption id="attachment_32920" align="aligncenter" width="800"]
Figure 2: Modern Software Delivery Capability Interlocks[/caption]
The relationship between several factors regulates the ability to increase speed and optimize flow:
- The size of each work unit
- Transparency in a work unit's current state
- Automated handoffs and flows
- Automated provisioning
- Movement of work through the organization.
How You Can Tell if You Suffer From a Traditional IT Value Chain
The key symptom that an organization has a legacy approach to development and delivery is the business department’s relationship with IT. Often, strained relationships between IT and the business result directly from the business's need for ever-increasing demands for agility and speed and IT's inability to match the pace of demand. This leads to mismatched expectations and frustration. When faced with chronic dissatisfaction, businesses will reach outside their organization for a solution. The ubiquity and ease of access to ready-on-demand, targeted solutions — especially with many cloud or software as a solution (SaaS) approaches being a credit card sign up away — means that businesses will happily and readily bypass IT departments. This creates unmanaged and decentralized IT solutions – it creates shadow IT. Failure to achieve predictable delivery within budget is another hallmark of a traditional IT value chain. Even organizations that have transformed to Agile practices can struggle to achieve predictable delivery. Often, you will see these organizations have a hyper-focus on velocity and epic burndowns rather than outcome or value. When you see this, you must step back to look at the IT value chain to see how you are delivering value (and not just features) to the business. When delivery of themes and epics are the focus of an organization, you typically see them revert to a linear process where they are waiting for value at the end of the process after an accumulation of work has transpired. With Scrum, this means waiting for value for up to 2 weeks – due to the nature of accumulating stories in an artificial 2-week time box and then releasing them as a batch. Two-week sprints innately shortened the time to achieve some value, compared to traditional waterfall approaches, but many organizations cannot, or will not, release software every two weeks. The inability or unwillingness to release as soon as they complete their work means the organization cannot derive value from what they created. This actually is a form of technical debt – investment in work that cannot create value. While better than the old waterfall environment, it still directly impacts organizations and impedes achieving the full benefits of Agile and DevOps.Better, Faster and More Predictable: A Modern Software Delivery Approach
Our proven MSD methodology enables software delivery that provides reliable, scalable solutions for our clients. But we also teach your teams to adopt our MSD approach. That empowers them to build and deliver modern software themselves, synergizing Agile management, effective test automation, DevOps practices, modular architecture and cloud platforms. By looking at IT as a system and living organism, we can address bottlenecks as they arise and ensure we target investment at current challenges while building toward a future vision. [caption id="attachment_32590" align="aligncenter" width="994"]
Figure 3: Application Development[/caption]
Unfortunately, organizations often target one area at a time without regard to its impact on other areas.
For example, many organizations have undertaken an Agile transformation, and some have even implemented SAFe. As a result, most teams are operating in Scrum fashion. However, as those same organizations look to implement DevOps, the size of the story directly affects the speed at which they can perform things like CI. After all, you can't integrate a story faster than you can develop it, and you can't release faster than you can develop the story.
Even still, as most organizations mature with Agile and transition to implementing DevOps, they often encounter their next bottleneck: testing. While the Cloud is DevOps ready, your operations may not be DevOps capable. Only by focusing on MSD as a system can your organization truly achieve the promise of many of these practices and methodologies.
Ensuring Quality Across the Value Delivery Chain
Regardless of where you are in the software development life cycle — from defining your product through development, delivery and operations — you must create an environment for quality across the value delivery chain. After all, quality is an attribute of what you build. This simple concept has far-reaching consequences for anybody involved in delivering IT value. To achieve quality at speed and scale, it's important to:- Define quality objectives
- Drive quality thinking across the value chain
- Measure quality.
