Charting the Journey to Continuous Deployment with a Value Stream Map

Continuous deployment isn't just for unicorns. Learn how a one-hour workshop can reveal the bottlenecks holding your team back from elite performance.

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Core principles for achieving continuous deployment

Value stream maps focus on how you deliver, software delivery is about building confidence, and continuous deployment is a realistic goal for most teams.

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Defining continuous deployment and its goals

Continuous deployment is the automated process of releasing a merged commit to production without human involvement to maximize time spent on value-adding activities.

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Classifying work with lean activity types

Lean principles categorize all work into value-generating activities to maximize, necessary waste to minimize, and unnecessary waste to eliminate.

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Measuring elite performance with DORA metrics

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.

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Optimizing delivery with small batch sizes

Reducing batch sizes lowers risk and increases predictability by minimizing holding costs and transaction costs through automation like CI/CD.

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Using value stream mapping as a software gemba walk

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.

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How to run a lightweight value stream mapping workshop

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.

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Analyzing the map to find confidence-building bottlenecks

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.

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Designing a future state with automated regression testing

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.

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Identifying when continuous deployment is not suitable

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.

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Final summary of key takeaways for your team

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.