The Continuous Delivery: Lean life cycle is a natural progression from the Lean life cycle. It supports the goal of delivering increments of the solution in a more frequent manner than the other life cycles. Teams typically evolve into this life cycle from either the Lean life cycle or the Continuous Delivery: Agile life cycle. It requires a mature set of practices around continuous integration and deployment in order to be practical. It also requires the technical infrastructure and advanced Disciplined DevOps practice that support this approach.
Figure 1. DAD’s Continuous Delivery: Lean Life Cycle (click to expand).
When to Apply This Life Cycle
It is best suited in these types of situations:
- Solutions that can be delivered to stakeholders in a frequent and incremental basis
- New work, including both new requirements and defect reports, arrives often
- Organizations with streamlined deployment practices and procedures
- Projects where getting value into the hands of stakeholders rapidly, before the entire solution is complete, is critical
- Teams with mature DevOps practices in place including; continuous integration, continuous deployment, and automated regression testing
- The team is long-lived (stable), working on a series of releases over time