Continuous everything
When you build a new digital solution, there’s a sense of achievement for the whole team. Designers, software engineers, product managers and users. If you do it right, they work together, focused on the top of the mountain. The end goal. The finish line. But first you need the right building blocks in place, and you need to know where the finish line is.
Continuous improvement can provide the means to unify and accelerate your product success, and produce a better quality product and user experience. It combines several aspects of development including continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery (CD) and continuous deployment.
At Worth, these are areas in which we’ve built up significant expertise across the years. In our experience, when you move from traditional innovation to making automated, continuous improvements, you build better products and services for your customers. Here are four ‘C’s of continuous everything.
1. Continuous integration
CI uses practices such as daily builds and continuous testing, which enable you to catch problems before they get out of hand, and mitigate risk. The concept of CI dates back to 1993, as a means to avoid massive code conflicts at the end of the development cycle by constantly merging code over time. It’s since become foundational to modern product development. Release often and safely.
2. Continuous delivery
Continuous delivery, which dates back to 2010, works hand-in-hand with continuous integration, staging updates for release. Set your release into production on a regular cadence or as often as required, keeping batches small and frequent to take full advantage of the fast feedback cycle.
3. Continuous deployment
Time to fly. Remove all manual intervention and repetitive tasks. The full production pipeline is automated. Forget release day pressures, the big bang approach, reduce time to market and bring value to users in the fastest way. Deployment is not the end of the road however and many companies and teams celebrate too early. At this point, get ready for the feedback.
4. Continuous improvement
When software is released it is time to celebrate, well not quite! The work is far from done. The outcome has not yet been realised. Iterating quickly relies on monitoring the feedback from users and building metrics that measure the outcome not the output.
By testing, improving and reissuing products, you can gain a competitive advantage, react to change more quickly, derive value faster, and be more responsive to customers and end users.
The Worth continuous improvement approach makes us an ideal partner. We can rapidly realise your concepts and provide concrete quantitative feedback to enable a rich data-informed design loop. Short loops minimise design inventory which minimises waste. Reducing inventory also makes for short planning horizons which avoids creating all of the change management and false expectation issues typical of a big bang release.
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