4 steps to continuous development and positive organisational change

Source – anatas.com.au

Continuous delivery is a software development approach that involves implementing small but frequent improvements to a product based on user feedback. It’s a methodology widely favoured over less responsive, more traditional methods.

Rather than trying to build a final complex piece of software without knowing whether anyone will use it, continuous delivery allows customers to engage with versions that are still a work in progress. Any feedback can then be looped back and corrections made sooner, more frequently and with less effort required.

Under this model, software can be introduced to the market with some potentially desired functions absent to begin with, then upgraded incrementally to fit user demands.

Industry experts believe this kind of evolving, iterative approach can save significant resources in terms of time, effort and money spent, compared with releasing a fully-finished product to market with a wide range of untested functionalities.

Where is the future of software development heading?

Umit Tacay, CTO of ANATAS, said the future of software development is going to be much more iterative.

“That’s where we’re heading. The mobile industry has impacted software delivery quite a bit. Mobile apps are being delivered quickly and they’re getting updates quickly,” said Mr. Tacay.

“That’s setting users’ expectations in general. So IT is going to have to change the way it works to be delivering iterative, quick updates, smaller applications and adding features, removing features, much more quickly than what they were used to.”

Continuous delivery is a discipline that requires changes to the way people in an organisation work.

Mr Tacay cautioned however that continuous delivery is not something that can be learned over night or carried out by just one or two people in a company’s IT department.

“It’s is a discipline that requires a lot of change to the way people throughout an organisation work,” he said.

“If you Google how to produce an app then attempt it, you might push out one project. But you are not going to build the discipline that’s necessary to enable you to deliver continuously and that is the whole point of this exercise.”

Overhauling legacy applications a major challenge

In Australia and New Zealand, many large organisations are still relying on legacy applications that are 10 to 20 years old. However, older systems can be costly to maintain, the programming languages they use are no longer in widespread use, and the people who possess the necessary skill set to keep them going are becoming rarer and more expensive to hire.

Chief Strategy Officer at IntegrationQA, Matt Mansell, said changing or replacing legacy applications gets more difficult the longer you leave them in place.

“Using a car analogy, it’s like when you try to keep your 30-year-old car functioning without maintaining it very well for those 30 years. It just gets harder and harder and more and more expensive. Parts get harder to find,” Mr. Mansell explained.

ANATAS helps you manage change in four simple steps

Leading IT consultancy firm ANATAS has helped many Australian and New Zealand companies replace their out-dated systems with less costly and more versatile solutions that take advantage of continuous delivery modes of development. ANATAS consultants also help guide organisations through the change management process, by following a four-step process:

1. Conduct a maturity assessment to understand the current status of an organisation’s IT, governance, strategy and work funding practices.
2. Collaborate with key stakeholders in the company to understand the desired target status.
3. Prepare a road map to look at the possible pathways to get from the current state to the target state.
4. Continuously deliver, through an ongoing cycle of experimentation, the evolution of the organisation using that road map.