Whitepaper: A Roadmap to Continuous Delivery Pipeline Maturity

That way, the API program starts delivering value that can be measured in business-level KPIs. This stage encompasses development and configuration enhancements based on the proposed recommendations. It also requires a pragmatic approach that should start with an API program initiative that unifies APIs based on logical groupings. The program should package APIs as a product or service to drive adoption and facilitate management for their entire lifecycle. The challenge is that creating a viable program to manage API maturity is a slow process. Check out Gary Gruver’s talk on implementing CD at HP from FlowCon last year that discusses how they did it.

  1. It also defines API lifecycle progression policies and ensures APIs adhere to architectural and security compliances.
  2. You can use it to assess the current state of your application delivery pipeline and develop a roadmap to improve the agility and quality of how you bring applications and new features to market.
  3. DevOps teams need to learn more advanced techniques and tools while they master the basics.

This is why we created the Continuous Delivery Maturity Model, to give structure and understanding to the implementation of Continuous Delivery and its core components. With this model we aim to be broader, to extend the concept beyond automation and spotlight all the key aspects you need to consider for a successful Continuous Delivery implementation across the entire organization. Improving an organization’s project management maturity will reap many rewards. It helps to complete projects on time, manage risk, achieve project goals, deliver more benefits and handle change with minor disruption. These responsibilities usually fall under the purview of a project management office (PMO) and can be facilitated by using project management software. According to the DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment) program, a Google Cloud DevOps research team, a company can be at one of the fourth stages of DevOps.

Stage 1: A regressive, mostly manual starting point

In addition to offline model validation, a newly deployed model
undergoes online model validation—in a canary deployment or an A/B testing
setup—before it serves prediction for the online traffic. To develop and operate complex systems like these, you can apply DevOps
principles to ML systems (MLOps). This document covers concepts to consider when
setting
up an MLOps environment for your data science practices, such as CI, CD, and CT
in ML. At this stage in the model, the participants might be in a DevOps team, or simply developers and IT operations collaborating on a joint project. Discover transformative insights to level up your software development decisions.

Boström, Palmborg and Rehn Continuous Delivery Maturity Model

The next level in the continuous delivery maturity model entails defining the activities for the entire move-to-production process, along with the file and system locations plus tooling to automate it. The goal is to increase release cycles’ consistency, not their speed, although the intermediate stage is typically when organizations can stick to regular releases on a defined schedule, such as nightly or weekly. This five-phase continuous delivery maturity model borrows its structure from the CMM, progressing from a base level of no effective capability through beginner, intermediate, advanced and expert stages.

It’s a path to the advanced capabilities befitting the DevOps major leaguers that deploy multiple times a day or even multiple times an hour. These tests are especially valuable when working in a highly component based architecture or when good complete integration tests are difficult to implement or too slow to run frequently. At this level you will most likely start continuous delivery maturity model to look at gradually automating parts of the acceptance testing. While integration tests are component specific, acceptance tests typically span over several components and across multiple systems. At this stage, DevOps teams — continuous delivery experts all adopt some form of DevOps structure — have fully automated a code build, integration and delivery pipeline.

The levels are not strict and mandatory stages that needs to be passed in sequence, but rather should serve as a base for evaluation and planning. It is however important to try to keep the overall maturity level fairly even and to keep in mind that big changes may cause skepticism and reluctance in the organization, so an incremental approach to moving through the levels is recommended. The Codefresh platform is a complete software supply chain to build, test, deliver, and manage software with integrations so teams can pick best-of-breed tools to support that supply chain. Delivering new software is the single most important function of businesses trying to compete today.

Continuous Delivery 3.0 Maturity Model

This continuous delivery model allows the business to receive a return on investment as soon as possible and also reduce risky and repetitive tasks. The pros and cons of the continuous delivery maturity model will help the company decide whether its implementation is the right step at this time. While they can serve as a starting point, they should not be considered as essential models to adopt and follow. The CDMM can be used to identify areas for improvement and guide an organization’s efforts to implement continuous delivery practices. It can also be used to benchmark the organization’s maturity level and track its progress over time.

Metrics should improve as the API program moves through a series of transitions from lower to higher maturity levels. ProjectManager is online project management software that connects teams whether they’re in the field, in the office or anywhere in between. We also have resource management features that help you balance your team’s workload to keep them working at capacity and stay productive. Join teams at Avis, Nestle and Siemens who are using our software to deliver successful projects.

Portfolio, Program and Project Management Maturity Model (P3M by Axelos

Reporting at this stage would typically include static analysis of code and quality reports which might be scheduled so that the latest reports are always accessible to facilitate decisions on quality and where improvements are needed. At the base level in this category it is important to establish some baseline metric for the current process, so you can start to measure and track. Interesting metrics can e.g. be cycle-time, delivery time, number of releases, number of emergency fixes, number of incidents, number of features per release, bugs found during integration test etc.

When your organization reaches API program maturity Level 4, you will have fully externalized APIs as products. This final stage of API evolution is driven more by business needs than technology. You may already have a well-oiled technology stack at this level and are driving API adoption among internal and partner stakeholders because APIs generate a lot of business value. Digital transformation can impact every aspect of an organization when it’s done correctly. Unfortunately, a common side effect of digital transformation is addressing the problem of API maturity.

This manual, data-scientist-driven process might be sufficient
when models are rarely changed or trained. The models fail to adapt to changes in the
dynamics of the environment, or changes in the data that describes the
environment. For more information, see
Why Machine Learning Models Crash and Burn in Production. The engineering team might have their own complex setup for API configuration,
testing, and deployment, including security, regression, and load and canary
testing.

Business leaders now have begun to embrace the fact that there is a new way of thinking about software development. IT can once again start pushing innovation instead of restraining it by expensive, slow, unpredictable and outdated processes. There are many ways to enter this new era and here we will describe a structured approach to attaining the best results. While agile methodologies often are described to best grow from inside the organization we have found that this approach also has limitations.

The model will indicate which practices are essential, which should be considered advanced or expert and what is required to move from one level to the next. CDMM provides a structured way for organizations to assess and improve their ability to implement continuous delivery practices, which can lead to increased efficiency, quality, and stakeholder satisfaction. However, these APIs are relatively simple and don’t require advanced programmable capabilities. Level 1 is also defined by a relatively immature, hand-cranked approach to API deployment. Manual deployment of individual APIs does not support closely-knit API lifecycle management. They’re pursuing continuous improvement, such as reducing and preventing defects and incorporating automation.

Practicing MLOps means that you advocate for automation and
monitoring at all steps of ML system construction, including integration,
testing, releasing, deployment and infrastructure management. To maintain a consistent release train, the team must automate test suites that verify software quality and use parallel deployment environments for software versions. Automation brings the CI/CD approach to unit tests, typically during the development stage and integration stage when all modules are brought together. At this stage it might also become necessary to scale out the build to multiple machines for parallel processing and for specific target environments. Techniques for zero downtime deploys can be important to include in the automated process to gain better flexibility and to reduce risk and cost when releasing.

Eric Minick discusses continuous delivery challenges in the enterprise where large projects, distributed teams or strict governance requirements have resulted in increased automation efforts throughout the life cycle. The “CD” in CI/CD can refer to continuous deployment or continuous delivery, which describe ways to automate further stages of the pipeline. MLOps level 0 is common in many businesses that are beginning to apply ML to
their use cases.

They’ll also provide you with direction in terms of identifying issues and developing responses that address them to create improved project management in the future. Advanced practices include fully automatic acceptance tests and maybe also generating structured acceptance criteria directly from requirements with e.g. specification by example and domains specific languages. This means no manual testing or verification is needed to pass acceptance but typically the process will still include https://g-markets.net/ some exploratory testing that feeds back into automated tests to constantly improve the test coverage and quality. If you correlate test coverage with change traceability you can start practicing risk based testing for better value of manual exploratory testing. At the advanced level some organizations might also start looking at automating performance tests and security scans. The journey that started with the Agile movement a decade ago is finally getting a strong foothold in the industry.