This Transition phase process goal describes our approach to releasing/shipping our solution. Many Disciplined Agilists’ first reaction to this is: “Well, why don’t we just completely automate deployment?” And they’re right, we should.
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:
- Promotes full automation. This process goal provides several strategies for automating the deployment/release of your solution.
- Captures the full deployment process. It describes what needs to be performed to successfully release into production, and it describes options for how we can ensure our release was in fact successful.
- Supports appropriate governance. As you can see in Figure 2, there is an explicit Delighted Stakeholders milestone built into the DA project lifecycles to validate that what you’ve deployed is something your stakeholders value. Risk-based milestones are an important part of DA’s lean governance strategy.
Figure 2. Decreasing risk and increasing value throughout a disciplined agile project (click diagram to expand)
Important Questions to Consider
- How can we automate deployment?
- What is our release strategy?
- What do we need to do to deploy the solution?
- How will we determine that the deployment was successful?
Key Points
- Your end goal should be to automate the entire deployment process, decreasing both the cost and risk of releasing into production.
- Smart teams validate that they’ve successfully released into production, and better yet strive to determine whether they’ve delighted their customers.
January 2023