Climb the five steps of a continuous delivery maturity model

By evaluating the organization’s capabilities in each of these domains, the DevOps Maturity Model can help identify areas of strengths and weaknesses, prioritize improvements and track progress over time. One of the first considerations a PM needs to address is the project team’s Release Management Maturity. The levels are not strict and mandatory stages that needs to be passed in sequence, but rather should serve as a base for evaluation and planning. It is however important to try to keep the overall maturity level fairly even and to keep in mind that big changes may cause skepticism and reluctance in the organization, so an incremental approach to moving through the levels is recommended. Continuous Delivery is all about seeing the big picture, to consider all aspects that affect the ability to develop and release your software. For any non-trivial business of reasonable size this will unfortunately include quite a lot of steps and activities.

If you’re looking to take your software development to the next level, consider investing in DevOps services. These services can help you to assess your organization’s DevOps maturity level, identify areas for improvement and develop a roadmap for DevOps implementation. They can also provide you with access to experienced DevOps professionals who can help you to design and implement DevOps processes, tools and practices that align with your business goals.

Training Move your teams or your own career

Here’s how we empowered one of the leading AI robot companies with the right compliance and faster deployments in their DevSecOps processes. When IT reaches a point where CD is possible, they are finally in the best position to deliver value to their clients in the shortest turnaround time and maximum level of quality possible within that environment; at least from a technical perspective. The DevSecOps Maturity Model, which is presented in the talk, shows security measures which are applied when using DevOps strategies and how these can be prioritized. For example, each component such as application libraries and operating system libraries in docker images can be tested for known vulnerabilities. Attackers are intelligent and creative, equipped with new technologies and purpose.

In looking at the three ways of DevOps – flow, amplify feedback, and continuous learning and experimentation – each phase flows into the other to break down silos and inform key stakeholders. One small but impactful way to initiate culture change is to run workshops that identify areas of improvement between your dev & ops teams. Culture is the foundation on which every successful team is built and is a core ingredient of a DevOps implementation.

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At this advanced level, teams also tackle harder deployment problems, such as multi-tier applications in which several components must deploy together, but are on different release cycles. These composite applications also include more sophisticated components, notably databases, that are complicated to deploy and test. As teams mature they will want to focus on automated testing with Unit, Integration, Functional, Stress/Load and Performance testing. Most teams new to automated testing focus on Integration Tests when all teams should start at the lowest level with Unit Tests. As teams grow and mature they should work their way up the pyramid of testing levels. Each additional level requires more sophisticated control mechanisms including specialized execution environments (Integration servers).

At the advanced level, the team will have the competence and confidence it needs to be responsible for changes all the way to production. Continuous improvement mechanisms are in place and e.g. a dedicated tools team is set up to serve other teams by improving tools and automation. At this level, releases of functionality can be disconnected from the actual deployment, which gives the projects a somewhat different role.