Value stream maps focus on how you deliver, software delivery is about building confidence, and continuous deployment is a realistic goal for most teams.
Continuous deployment is the automated process of releasing a merged commit to production without human involvement to maximize time spent on value-adding activities.
Lean principles categorize all work into value-generating activities to maximize, necessary waste to minimize, and unnecessary waste to eliminate.
The four DORA metrics—lead time, deployment frequency, time to restore service, and change failure rate—provide a verified way to measure and benchmark software delivery performance.
Reducing batch sizes lowers risk and increases predictability by minimizing holding costs and transaction costs through automation like CI/CD.
Value stream mapping adapts the lean concept of a Gemba walk to software, allowing teams to visualize and non-judgmentally observe their end-to-end delivery process.
A simple workshop using a whiteboard and post-it notes can map the entire process from idea to value, using different colors to represent branching strategies.
By analyzing the value stream map, teams can identify major bottlenecks, such as manual QA wait times, that slow down the process of building confidence for a release.
The ideal future state eliminates bottlenecks by automating all regression testing and shifting manual QA to exploratory testing in production using feature flags or canary deployments.
Continuous deployment may be inappropriate for systems with an inherently high cost of change or high risk of release, such as critical infrastructure or on-premise software requiring travel.
A recap of the core ideas: value stream maps focus on process, delivery is about confidence, and continuous deployment is an achievable goal for most teams.
56:19Pawel Piwosz
57:53Jacob Duijzer
34:00Álvaro Martín Lozano
37:46Sonal Patil
44:42Michael Cade
43:00Luka Kladaric
52:05Megha Kadur
46:37Chris Riley
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Jobs that call for the skills explored in this talk.
Vesterling Consulting GmbH