YOUR CONTINUOUS DEPLOYMENT M.O.T.

Author:  Joey Flint, Liqueo Agile Ways of Working Coach

As an organisation, your teams should be delivering regularly with frequent feedback loops to enable them to innovate while also maintaining quality. This article provides an easy-to-follow framework that allows your teams to assess where they are in adopting continuous deployment practices and what they should be aiming for next. 

Véronique Skelsey and Mike Collins from Liqueo’s Ways of Working team recently published an article on Agile and DevOps. It provides a useful overview of how Agile and DevOps work together to enable teams to deliver value predictably and to high quality. 
Even today, with the proliferation of Agile literature and armies of Agile Coaches, not many teams manage to reach true continuous delivery maturity. We define this as the ability to continuously and seamlessly integrate and deploy, thereby enabling rapid iteration and value delivery to the customer.

Neglecting your continuous deployment pipeline is like investing in building a state-of-the-art bullet train but neglecting to upgrade the tracks and assuming you will achieve the same result.
So where is your organisation on its continuous deployment journey and how rickety are your tracks?  

At Liqueo we’ve devised a rating system which takes five key areas into consideration:
- how change is introduced. 
- how teams identify and introduce improvement. 
- the stages teams go through to get an idea implemented.  
- how resilience and organisational support is managed. 
- finally, how manual steps are automated where possible.

Our rating system explained: