Getting Started with DevOps Workshop

Improving time-to-market with SAFe’s CALMR approach to DevOps and Release on Demand

Improving time-to-market with SAFe’s CALMR approach to DevOps and Release on Demand. Approaches to implementing DevOps are diverse, without a standard playbook or central manifesto. Learn how to use the principles on which SAFe DevOps is based and what successful DevOps organizations tend to have in common.

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Responding to digital disruption

Software is becoming increasingly integral to the operation of every business in every sector in every market. Therefore, almost every business today has become a de facto digital enterprise. And each is vulnerable to the disruptions caused by new competitors leveraging digital technology to quickly enter markets and overturn existing business models. Many companies that did not react to the digital revolution are already gone.

The Scaled Agile Framework serves the business imperative of making organizations more agile in responding to digital disruption. The DevOps and Release on Demand competency’s focus on enabling the business to release on demand plays a key role in ensuring greater enterprise agility. It’s a critical enabler for the ability to release on demand, because it helps overcome traditional misalignments across the Value Stream.

SAFe’s CALMR approach to DevOps and Release on Demand

1. Culture

Establish a culture of shared responsibility for development, deployment, and operations.

2. Automation

Automate the Continuous Delivery Pipeline.

3. Lean flow

Keep batch sizes small, limit Work in Progress (WIP), and provide extreme visibility.

4. Measurement

Measure the flow through the pipeline. Implement full-stack telemetry.

5. Recovery

Architect and enable low-risk releases. Establish fast recovery, fast reversion, and fast fix-forward.Preparation In order to advise and assist with the preparation tasks, the Quickstart typically includes one or more days of consultation (delivered remotely).

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Moving value through the enterprise

DevOps is an enterprise-wide culture and practice. Although it does not have a commonly accepted manifesto or playbook, core capabilities of successful DevOps implementations can be identified. These capabilities provide the foundational principles for SAFe’s CALMR (Culture, Automation, Lean flow, Measurement, Recovery) approach to DevOps. Five core concepts of DevOps and Release on Demand help improve delivery pipelines:

1. Mapping the pipeline

2. Gaining alignment with Continuous Exploration (CE)

3. Building quality in with Continuous Integration (CI)

4. Reducing time-to-market with Continuous Deployment (CD)

5. Delivering business value with release on demand

Five core concepts of DevOps and Release on Demand help improve delivery pipelines:

1. Mapping the pipeline

When implementing DevOps, as with any enterprise transformation, the problem is that even after a good action plan is created, the team is not sure how to act on it or whether the right people are even working on it. Value Stream mapping is a multifaceted tool for identifying problems with the flow of value and building a better future map and an action plan. This draws clarity to where the bottlenecks lie and where the improvements are most needed.

2. Gaining alignment with continuous exploration

Continuous exploration is the process of continually exploring the market and user needs, as well as defining a Vision, Roadmap, Architecture, and set of Features that address these needs. CE helps to build alignment across the organization about what should be built or what hypothesis should be evaluated.

3. Building quality in with continuous integration

Stakeholders need to see work turning into tangible, working solutions. Continuous integration ensures that development teams are not only busy, but productive, by delivering working software and systems each Iteration. Without CI, teams may be sprinting, but the system as a whole might not be iterating.

4. Reducing time-to-market with continuous deployment

Enterprises deploy continuously to get to market quickly and enable the business to release value on demand. In SAFe, deployment is decoupled from release. Therefore, continuous deployment focuses on deploying continuously to production, not going live to end users.

5. Delivering business value with release on demand

Releasing value on demand provides the business with the capability of getting value into the hands of users when there is market and user demand for it. The final part of every hypothesis learning cycle is evaluating with customers and users, and learning for further exploration. Responsibility for operating the solution is shared across the organization.

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