Xebia Articles

The business of any IT-enabled organization desperately depends on its ability to deliver functionality, timely and frequently. That means their utmost priority should be ensuring that software is available and works as promised. But with the myriad of modern development methods, techniques, and frameworks (not to mention reorganizations), this goal often falls by the wayside. Putting the software delivery process front and center is the only way to improve it. This article describes exactly how to achieve that and identifies the key, next steps to take.

Organizations need to develop the ability to release valuable software whenever they want. Yet, despite their continuous delivery and agile endeavors, many organizations still cannot release working software on demand. Instead, it often takes multiple sprints lengths to put working software into production. Future-ready organizations develop the ability to bring high-quality software to production instantly.

Why? Because too many activities are delayed until after the sprint although organizations experience an ever increasing need to deliver value to production. This article takes you through the most important pain points IT organizations experience when putting quality software into production. Next, we suggest a series of next steps to start addressing these pain points. This will help organizations to get a very important trend at their fingertips: organizations bringing high-quality software to production instantly.

Excellent is the average of tomorrow. Organizations have to speed up, cooperate flawlessly and be able to release quality software into production whenever they want. Only then will they be truly successful and stay ahead of competition. One crucial prerequisite is smooth cooperation between business and IT. One often hears that business doesn’t understand “why IT just doesn’t deliver the features we’ve asked for” whereas IT finds that “business should do their work properly by articulating clear requirements.” This traditional business and IT gap still is present in many organizations – ultimately causing these organizations to slide back from excellent to average.

Software development is an inherent social activity. Put a group of great minds together, each from their own discipline, and see how innovation can flourish. In high performing agile teams, bottlenecks are really not what one wants. And surely no ‘business bottlenecks’. A lack of innovative ideas, poorly specified epics or user stories will put the software development team machine to a grinding halt. Luckily, solutions exist that can act as catalysts or even fuel the machine: behaviour-driven development tools.