Part 3:Optimize – Enabling a Continuous Delivery Pipeline

In SAFe®, the Continuous Delivery Pipeline is a marriage of processes and automation that allows value streams, implemented as Agile Release Trains (ARTs), to develop and deploy following a cadence, but release on demand when it suits the organization.

We will start our exploration of the Continuous Delivery Pipeline with Continuous Exploration. With Continuous Exploration, we will set up our ideas for new solutions or enhancements as experiments to elaborate, research, and prioritize for PI planning.

In Continuous Integration, the next stage of the Continuous Delivery Pipeline, we will develop our experiments. We will begin the automation process after coding to allow testing and packaging if testing succeeds.

During Continuous Deployment, we will strive to deploy our solutions to a production environment. We will strive to deploy these changes without disrupting our production environment and customers, as well as to allow testing in production. We will discuss methods for performing the separation of deployment and release in Chapter 12.

Finally, we will Release on Demand. This allows us to deliver value to our customers. We will monitor the release, ensuring it validates our experiment’s hypothesis, with no adverse effects on the production environment in terms of security or availability.

This part of the book comprises the following chapters:

• Chapter 10, Continuous Exploration and Finding New Features
• Chapter 11, Continuous Integration of Solution Development
• Chapter 12, Continuous Deployment to Production
• Chapter 13, Releasing on Demand to Realize Value