Welcome to a comprehensive exploration of the backbone of successful software development within the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). In this blog, we embark on a deep dive into the intricacies of the Continuous Delivery Pipeline, deciphering its significance, components, and transformative impact on the way organizations deliver value. Let us take a quick look at what exactly is a Continuous Delivery Pipeline.
What is CDP (Continuous Delivery Pipeline)?
The Continuous Delivery Pipeline (CDP) represents the workflows, activities, and automation needed to guide new functionality from ideation to an on-demand release of value. The figure illustrates the pipeline’s four aspects: Continuous Exploration (CE), Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Deployment (CD), and Release on Demand.
It is a significant element of the Agile Product Delivery competency. Every ART shares a pipeline with te assets and technologies needed to deliver solution value as independently as possible. An ART can deliver new functionality to users far more frequently than traditional process by building and maintaining a CDP.
The four aspects of the CDP
The SAFe CDP enables organizations to map their current pipeline into a new structure and use relentless improvement to deliver value to the customers. It has mainly four aspects which is described below:
- Continuous Exploration
It focuses on creating alignment on what needs to be built. In CE, it is ensured by Design thinking that the organization understands the market problem or customer need and the solution required.
- Continuous Integration
CI focuses on taking features from the ART backlog and implementing them. The application of design thinking tools in CI focuses on the refinement of the features, which might motivate more research and usage of solution tools.
- Continuous Deployment
CD takes the changes from staging environments and deploys them into production. This step makes sure that features are available in production, where the appropriate time to release it to the customers is decided.
- Release on Demand
RoD is the ability to make value available to customers together or in a staggered fashion-based on market and business needs. This approach allows the business to release when market timing is optimal and carefully controls the risk associated with each release.
One thing to note here is that though these aspects are described sequentially, the pipeline isn’t strictly linear. Instead it’s a learning cycle as illustrated below.
Mapping the Current Workflow
If you remember SAFe principle #6, it told us about ensuring value flow without interruption. The first step towards attaining that is mapping the current pipeline. The below figure illustrates the flow of value through a organization’s CDP, which is focused initially on new Feature development. Over time, this extends from new feature to maintenance and improvements. Once mapping is done, metrics can be collected and recorded to understand the reasons for delay. The four primary metrics which are used are
- Process time
- Lead time
- Delay time
- Percent complete and accurate
Once the flow is understood, it can be mapped with the SAFe CDP. It helps the organization in adopting a shared mental model and communicate changes & improvements efficiently.
Identifying Improvement Opportunities
Agile teams are always on the lookout for improvement opportunities to improve their efficiency. This helps them to reduce the total lead time, improving the time taken to address processes and ensuring quality.
As shown in the below figure, the delay time between steps is often the most significant initial factor. Delay time represents handoffs, waiting, and other non-value-added wastes. This process has two considerable delays and a substantial amount of rework in the first step of the deployment process. Reducing delays is typically the fastest and easiest way to lower the total lead time. Another high-priority area to improve is any step with low %C&A metrics, as reducing rework enables the ART to focus on creating value (for example, for a software solution, instead of fixing bugs, the team can focus on new features). Subsequent opportunities for improvement focus on reducing the batch size and applying the DevOps practices identified in each of the specific articles describing the continuous delivery pipeline.
How to track Continuous Delivery
Being an extensive process, it is absolutely critical that Continuous Delivery is being tracked within the organization. Product management and its stakeholders must be visualizing and tracking ongoing work, using the ART Kanban which facilitates the flow of features. Shown below is a typical ART Kanban, followed the summarization of the series of states.
- Funnel – capture state for all new features or enhancement of existing system features
- Analyzing – features that best align with the vision are pulled into the analyzing step for further exploration.
- Ready – higher-priority features move to the backlog after analysis where they’re ranked
- Implementing – at every PI boundary, top features from the ART backlog are pulled into the implementing stage, where they’re developed and integrated
- Validating on staging – features ready for feedback are integrated with the rest of the system in a staging environment and then tested and validated
- Deploying to production – features are deployed into the production environment as per available capacity, where they await release
- Releasing – features are released once a sufficient amount of value has been created to meet market demands and the benefit hypothesis is evaluated
- Done – once hypothesis is satisfied, no further work on the feature is necessary, and it moves to the done column.
Enabling CDP with DevOps
Building, maintaining, and optimizing a continuous delivery pipeline requires specialized skills and tools throughout the entire value stream. Because this type of delivery system calls for the rapid delivery of complex solutions with very short learning loops and high degrees of cross-functional collaboration, DevOps methods are ideally suited to enable it. In other words, continuous delivery pipelines are best implemented with DevOps, as illustrated below:
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Aman Luthra 
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