The Future of Software Delivery

The quick pace of change in the software industry is staggering, especially when put in the context of DevOps. Just a decade ago the term DevOps was little known, yet this fundamental shift in software delivery is universally accepted today.

The future of software delivery is more time spent on ideation, iteration, and the breaking down of siloed work. How is this done? A concept long practiced in the business and change management world known as “Value Stream Management”. Value Stream Management in software delivery is the practice of monitoring software delivery end-to-end and optimizing the “value-added.” Put succinctly, it is the next natural evolution in DevOps.

Gartner notably predicted 2021 as the year value streams will define the future of DevOps. This disruptive new DevOps mindset began when teams started to link multiple products together to create a “value toolchain” for software delivery. Traditionally, this process is siloed with teams building and deploying their code in a streamlined process without feedback.

The State of Value Stream Management 2021

Organizations are now at the forefront of leveraging their value stream maps to create visibility into how their software delivery processes are performing.  According to The State of Value Stream Management Report 2021, value stream visibility can reduce bottlenecks and improve software delivery velocity. The top 5 most valuable metrics reported were:

1. Cycle Time
2. Work in Progress (WIP)
3. Throughput
4. Code Quality
5. Flow Efficiency

The report also identified common challenges teams were facing in collecting these important metrics:

• 25.9% of teams manually collect data from several sources or spreadsheets
• 36.6% of teams aggregate flow metrics into a dashboard

Leveraging the Value Stream

Value Stream Management tool HCL Accelerate provides an opportunity for teams to automate the collection of these metrics, organize around the value stream, and create an ecosystem of continuous improvement. While some VSM tools can only use data from specific DevOps tools, HCL Accelerate integrates with all the DevOps tools an organization is already using. It eliminates the manual process of tracking delivery metrics in a spreadsheet and creates an integrated view of how the value stream is operating.

 

Visibility of the DevOps toolchain makes alignment easier and provides a clear way to measure the progression of digital transformation. In this age of distributed work around the globe and the increasing complexity of IT environments, automated visibility of workloads is necessary for optimizing software delivery.

HCL Accelerate is available on SoFy (a cloud-native solution factory).

HCLSoftware Terminology

• Value Stream: All members who are responsible for working together to create value for the customers being served
• Value Stream Mapping: The exercise of documenting the Value Stream (typically with boxes and lines).
• Value Stream Management: The practice of monitoring software delivery end-to-end and optimizing the “value-added”