This Construction phase process goal describes how your team will ensure your solution is ready to be deployed. This goal addresses testing, configuration management, configuration management, automation, and deployment aspects of development.
Click the diagram to open the interactive DA Browser, where you can learn more about the decision points and options of this goal.
Why This is Important
This process goal is important because it enables us to:
- Streamline deployment. For our deployment efforts to be effective, we must choose the best strategy that our team is capable of and actively plan our approach with applicable stakeholders such as operations engineers and release managers. We will need a strategy for how we release internally, such as into a demo environment or testing environment(s), and how we will release into production.
- Support a DevOps strategy through streamlining and automation. A key component of any DevOps strategy is automation of operational functionality to monitor and control running systems. In combination with automating your continuous integration (CI)/continuous deployment (CD) pipeline, this is often referred to as an “infrastructure as code” strategy.
- Build quality activities into our process. We want to build quality into our process from the very beginning of the life cycle, including both validation and verification (V&V) strategies. Ideally, we want to avoid injecting quality problems to begin with, typically through continuous collaboration, but failing that we want to find any potential defects as early as possible to reduce the average cost of fixing them. This is often referred to as a “shift left” strategy.
Important Questions to Consider
- How can we organize our team structure to improve our overall effectiveness?
- How can we optimize our overall way of working (WoW)?
- How can we do to improve the flow of work?
- How will we deploy our solution?
- How can we automate our technical infrastructure?
- How will we manage the assets that we produce?
- How will we manage the configuration of our assets?
- What strategies will we follow to validate our work?
- What types of testing will we need to perform?
- How will we assure stakeholders that the quality of our work is sufficient?
- How will we maintain traceability, if at all?
Key Points
- Teams actively streamline development through automation.
- When deployment isn’t (yet) fully automated, it will need to be planned for with appropriate stakeholders from operations.
- Teams actively test their work throughout Construction, building quality into the entire life cycle.
January 2023