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Automate Your Software Delivery Lifecycle

Optimize your SDLC to drive quality, throughput, and recover capacity.

  • Technology teams are overloaded as they become the de facto drivers of innovation.
  • Development is taking too long because engineers are spending too much time on manual SDLC processes and debt-ridden legacy applications.
  • Innovation is critical, but you don’t have time for it.
  • Business is asking for breakthrough products to get to market faster than ever.
  • Business confidence in IT’s ability to deliver reliably and on time is not high.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

  • An organization’s people are its most valuable capital assets with technology teams being essential in this category. They understand the business deeply and are de facto drivers of innovation. To ensure their value keeps increasing, training them in the latest tools, technologies, and processes must be a strategic priority.
  • Optimize and automate SDLC stages to recover team capacity. Recognize that automation without optimization is a recipe for long-term pain. Do it right the first time.
  • Optimization and automation are not one-hit wonders. Technical debt is a part of software systems and never goes away. Changing technical and business landscape may increase SDLC fragility. The only remedy is constant vigilance and enhancements to the processes.

Impact and Result

  • Analyze your SDLC’s optimization maturity level.
  • Use the SDLC Optimation Assessment diagnostic tool to identify areas of improvement.
  • Develop a quality-driven roadmap for the SDLC’s automation journey.
  • Use the release canvas to communicate product/service changes to facilitate operational changes.

Automate Your Software Delivery Lifecycle Research & Tools

Start here – read the Executive Brief

Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should optimize and automate your software delivery lifecycle and how you can quantify the benefits through recovering resource capacity. Understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

Automate Your Software Delivery Lifecycle – Executive Brief
Automate Your Software Delivery Lifecycle – Phases 1-4

1. Establish a context for your automation journey

Assess your organization’s current state and understand if you are ready to start your automation journey.

Optimate Your SDLC Playbook
Optimate Your SDLC Opportunity Canvas
Sample Recovered Capacity
SDLC Optimation Assessment

2. Optimize and automate intake, analysis, and design stages of the SDLC

Assess the planning stages of your SDLC. Setting the tone for development activities and ensuring they are optimized will result in effective and value-maximizing software systems.

3. Optimize and automate build, test, deploy, and operate stages of the SDLC

A proper planning stage should be complemented with cost-effective and maintainable build, test, deploy, and operate activities.

4. Create a compelling case for business with the help of a logical automation roadmap and skills-enhancement plan

Define an achievable automation adoption roadmap.

Workshop: Automate Your Software Delivery Lifecycle

Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

Module 1: Conduct a Current State and Readiness Assessment

The Purpose

  • Conduct a current state and readiness assessment.

Key Benefits Achieved

  • Stakeholder identification
  • Stakeholder pain points with SDLC
  • Root cause analysts for pain points
  • An assessment of current optimization state
  • Prioritization of SDLC stages

Activities

Outputs

1.1

Identify stakeholders

  • Stakeholders and their pain points
1.2

Highlight pain points with existing SDLC

1.3

Root cause analysis

  • Root cause of pain points
1.4

Assess SDLC optimization state

  • Assess SDLC current optimization state
1.5

Collect metrics and discuss their influence

  • Collect metric for prioritized SDLC stages
1.6

Prioritize SDLC stages

Module 2: Define Target States of SDLC Stages

The Purpose

Value map the SDLC stages and enhance the maps to include new tools and processes where needed.

Key Benefits Achieved

Target state SDLC with tools and techniques needed to optimize and automate it.

Activities

Outputs

2.1

Analyze SDLC stages and develop a list of prioritized enhancements for its optimization.

  • For each SDLC stage determine metrics and opportunity canvases

Module 3: Create an Automation Journey

The Purpose

  • Bring all the assessments done so far to create a journey that leads your SDLC to automation.

Key Benefits Achieved

  • Business proposal for buy-in
  • Training opportunities for technology teams
  • A prioritized roadmap to automation

Activities

Outputs

3.1

Define the organizational value of automation.

  • Business plan outline
3.2

Develop a roadmap for optimizing and automating your SDLC.

  • Roadmap
3.3

Identify training for technology teams that will assist in optimizing their outputs.

  • List of training for teams
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Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.

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Guided Implementation 1: Establish a context for your automation journey
  • Call 1: Scope requirements, objectives, and your specific challenges.
  • Call 2: Identify stakeholders and pain points.
  • Call 3: Assess SDLC optimization health.

Guided Implementation 2: Optimize and automate intake, analysis, and design stages of the SDLC
  • Call 1: Examine and make enhancements to Intake and Analysis processes.
  • Call 2: Examine and make enhancements to system and application design principles.

Guided Implementation 3: Optimize and automate build, test, deploy, and operate stages of the SDLC
  • Call 1: Assess and optimize the Build and Test processes.
  • Call 2: Identify and improve the deployment pipelines and telemetry of production systems.

Guided Implementation 4: Create a compelling case for business with the help of a logical automation roadmap and skills-enhancement plan
  • Call 1: Develop a business plan to gain stakeholder support for automation, create a journey map, and discuss skill improvement training needs.

Author

Usman Lakhani

Contributors

  • Haroon Shaikh, Engineering Manager, Software Delivery, Flipp
  • Altaz Valani, Research Director, Security Compass
  • Two anonymous external contributors – healthcare sector

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