DEV
OPS
Practices to continuously improve your
software development life cycle (SDLC)
model:
• Always seek to increase flow. If the process is well
defined, then the team can analyze and find
efficiencies.
• Always seek to achieve profound understanding of
the system. Like a craftsman or an athlete honing
their skills to unconscious levels, repeated exercises
and knowledge of your value stream leads to well
informed and expert flow-improvement decisions.
Practices to continuously improve your
automation:
• Ensure each step is built in a repeatable way. Repeat-
able procedures replace ad hoc and one-off steps.
• Never pass defects to the next step. Fix problems
immediately, as they become visible. Do not pass the
problem downstream.
• Never allow local optimization to create global degra-
dation. Do not introduce shortcuts that impact other
workstations or process steps in the value stream.
Practices to continuously improve your
collaboration:
• Embed knowledge where it is needed. Source control,
documentation and any specialized knowledge
should remain inside the loop and not outside.
• Allocate time to spend on improvement. Dedicate
resources and projects to “technical debt,” which
includes fixing bugs and refactoring code and
processes.
• Establish rituals to reward risk taking. In annual
employee reviews have managers focus less on bug
fixes and more on “how many experiments or new
tools did you try this year?”
• Introduce faults to test resiliency. Fire drills and
failover exercises test the system’s ability to endure
failures.
• Set ambitious stretch goals. Try reducing one-week
application release cycles to one day.
Where can a company start building its continuous improve-
ment muscles early? Using a tool like value stream mapping
is a good start. This helps an organization understand its
processes end to end, and gets all stakeholders involved in
the software development life cycle. This exercise creates a
visual map of the whole process – identifying where the lag
times and bottlenecks are. Using this information, stake-
holders at all parts of the process can work together to
strengthen the loop.
Continuous improvement is a concept that has been around
a long time yet is still driving change in modern times. It is
not a program that is just implemented, wrapped up and
reported on. To work well, a continuous improvement initia-
tive has to be continuous – ongoing, without a formal end.
It is a journey, and it is everybody’s job to make that journey
a success.
WINTER 2019 | THE DOPPLER | 23