2.8 Delivery processes & tools

Your delivery toolchain impacts the entire team, every single day. Getting it right means massive productivity gain.

Photo by Yiran Ding on Unsplash

This chapter extends deep below the surface of the playbook and software development. There’s enough information on building your delivery toolchain that I could write a completely separate book. I’ve chosen to tackle this by writing 2.8 Delivery processes & tools as a surface-level guide. Accompanying it are separate articles that explore different topics in depth. You’ll find an index of the accompanying articles under the “Further reading” heading.

Introduction

This is a big topic. Your delivery processes and accompanying tools address how you build and deliver software. We could just call this chapter “DevSecOps.” However, as I’m not writing a book specifically on “DSO” I’d rather not muddy the water with organizational issues. This chapter is specifically about identifying what your delivery pipeline is going to support — the process your pipeline will execute. Where will you integrate security in your delivery pipeline? Will your team use ephemeral environments? What SAST tools will you use, and will you do “canary releases?” How will you manage releases?

There are a lot of topics here. Accordingly, this chapter is about identifying what you need for your project, deciding how your pipeline will support those features, and defining a roadmap to get there. Going deep into each individual process is covered separately, in companion articles. See the Further reading section, near the end of the chapter, for an index of these articles. (For example, the article When should you think about security? discusses how to think about and approach security in your pipeline).

Team productivity and delivery

Some teams struggle with developer productivity. Many struggle with whole team productivity (meaning, the whole organization, from development to operations). Entire organizations exist solely for the purpose of making teams more productive, and many companies choose to invest in their advice, paying for expert analysis.

The outcome of many of those analyses is often misdirected. While organizational change, team reorganization, and switching to the latest and greatest agile thinking may prove beneficial, there are greater gains to be had elsewhere.

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