An Agile System of Delivery offers many advantages to an organization — enhanced predictability, cost savings, quality, and early ROI. However, it also reveals impediments to Agility which must be addressed. This is where an organizational Agile Transformation comes in handy. We’ll show you how to build a functional System of Delivery that will take your team’s performance to the next level and enable Business Agility.
Team Building
Team building is an integral element of any organization. It fosters relationships and builds trust between coworkers, enabling employees to perform at their peak performance levels.
Teams who enjoy high trust environments are more likely to share goals and expectations for working together, leading to increased productivity as a group. Furthermore, this Center for Creative Leadership study found that trust promotes personal growth and fosters successful teamwork.
Fostering bonds and trust within new teams can be a daunting challenge. To make this easier, try organizing some team building activities that allow participants to get to know one another better.
Product Backlogs
Product backlogs provide teams with a way to translate their big-picture strategic plans into achievable deliverables. Furthermore, they help set expectations with stakeholders and other teams, cutting down on waste in engineering time while keeping the team motivated towards meeting deadlines.
Agile teams keep their product backlogs updated and prioritized according to new requirements, a process known as backlog refinement.
Utilizing a prioritized backlog helps your team focus on work that is truly beneficial to both the business and customer. It encourages discussions about what matters most and promotes group prioritization, helping your team remain agile.
Continuous Integration
Continuous integration is a software engineering practice that merges developers’ working copies several times daily into a shared mainline. These integrations initiate automated builds with testing as part of its automated maintenance routine.
Continuous Integration (CI) cannot eliminate bugs, but it helps identify them and eliminate them. Furthermore, it ensures the code is error-free before being integrated into production.
Modern applications require a reliable integration process. This helps teams create higher quality code with fewer bugs.
A CI/CD pipeline allows teams to automate and monitor changes as they proceed through development and delivery. It also enables them to deliver new features more rapidly and precisely for customers.
Test Driven Development
Test driven development (TDDD), also known as TDD, is a software development method that emphasizes writing test cases before coding. This helps developers craft code that’s simple and free from bugs.
TDD (Tranche-driven development) is an efficient technique for creating applications at high speed. Its advantages include fewer errors, improved code clarity and swift refactoring.
However, it’s essential to recognize that this methodology can be challenging to learn and apply correctly. Extensive practice and understanding is necessary before reaping its full rewards.
To master Test Driven Development (TDD), it’s best to start small with projects whose structure is intuitive. Once you feel confident with TDD, you can advance onto larger initiatives.
Continuous Delivery
Continuous delivery is an extension of Agile thinking and DevOps culture, offering several advantages. Chief among them is its capacity to increase feedback loops between product teams and end users.
Deploying large-scale changes into production is minimized because it focuses on small software modifications that are easier to deploy, test, and fix if something doesn’t function correctly.
Continuous delivery relies on automating as many processes as possible, from check-in to build, testing, staging and deployment. Doing this can significantly reduce the amount of time it takes for code to go live in production.
