Ike.ninja

You’re probably like us in wanting to deliver your customers excellent software month after month. This is a big reason DevOps took off. Here’s how to automate and scale delivery continuously.

What’s wrong with the traditional delivery approach?

Well it isn’t exactly known for speed. Many developers drove productivity with Scrum training and certifications like PMP (Project Management Professional). Tremendously valuable. But from our point of view, the first step to priming your pipeline for faster delivery is changing your goal. Smaller, frequent delivery is key.

In our world, telling customers to wait months or years for a new feature just won’t cut it. Instead of imagining what you could deliver in a year with big bucks, see what you can provide in a month or two.

This means focus on small features, frequency and more opportunities to succeed. Even better, you’ll get real customer feedback regularly. So, you can adjust your approach.

What’s holding back your continuous delivery?

When it comes to automation, these are the usual barriers.

• Skill and creativity – Automation may not occur to you if you just execute lists. Try a hackathon like Capgemini’s Automation Hackathon.
• Being overloaded with tasks – Having no breathing room to consider, develop and test automation.
• The wrong tools. When you’re keeping legacy systems and mainframes up, it’s tough to start automating.

Moreover, our research says the top obstacles for making continuous delivery work are:

• A competitive, untrusting organizational culture
• Inefficient or lacking collaboration tools and skills
• An unchanging business view

1.  Get the skills you need to scale up delivery

You’re probably quite sharp at creating and testing features. But these trainings can help perform better.

• DevOps and continuous delivery introductory training, like the DevOps Institute.
• Product management training to better understand your customers and give them value. You can start with product demos and Sebastien Phlix’s reading list.

2.  Grease the wheels of continuous delivery with the right tools

Here’s how Plesk tools and features can steer your automated, scaled, continuous delivery.

1. Automatic database repair. Not all deliveries work first time. So the Plesk repair tool quickly rolls back your database, letting you continue your development work. When you know problems are easy to roll back and fix, you can take more risks and ship more features.
2. Improve your Linux server uptime with the KernelCare Extension. The best part? No need to login on Saturdays to do updates. Because reboots are unnecessary, and patches are automatically tracked.
3. React quick with Slack. Robust collaboration tools are critical for continuous delivery. Use Plesk Events in Slack to highlight problems, like a client’s traffic limit reached.
4. Improve Web Performance. Most people abandon a site that doesn’t load in 1-2s. As you roll out new features, use Plesk’s Google PageSpeed Insights extension to see how your next change will impact speed. Get an overall speed assessment and suggestions to improve. Gives you confidence to ship new features fast.

Get on the path to continuous delivery

To automate and scale up your delivery, the right tools, structure and processes are critical. Solve these with our Plesk help and you’ve got the key to continuous delivery.