Most IT managers get the request to increase the speed of delivering new functionality. But they are held back by long delivery times of new database and middleware environments. And when these environments are delivered, they cannot even guarantee that they work. The amount of time wasted on setup, and deployment of the environments is often underestimated or even ignored by teams and managers. Manual server management and application deployment are a huge waste of time and money. And performing these tasks manually is often prone to error and thus a big risk for uptime of production. Software quality is not only about good tests and good code inspection. The deployment and setup are equally important for the quality of an application. And this is where many teams could still achieve huge productivity gains.

While working as a software quality manager at a large company within the Netherlands, we started working on the repeatability and testability of our Linux platforms. We wanted to be able to deliver hight quality Linux platforms and deliver them fast. We believe that both of these abilities are key to achieving that goal. In the next month, I will post a series of blog posts on our experiences.

In the last couple of blog posts, I’ve talked about how to describe how mature you are in your ability to do continuous deployment. This blog post introduced a way to visualise the maturity. In this blog post I described the area’s of interest on the x-scale of the graph. While in the last blog post I described the levels of maturity on the y-scale. That’s all nice, but how do you use these ingredients to assess YOUR continuous deployment maturity? In this blog post, I will introduce some criteria.

In my last blog post, I described the main area’s of interest to work on to get faster and easier deployments. For every area, the level of maturity may be different. In this blog post, I will dive deeper in the levels of maturity and what they mean.

In my last blog post, I showed a way to visualize the level of maturity for the six interest area’s of continuous delivery. In this blog post, I will dig deeper into what the areas of interest are.