One year ago we set ourselves the task of doing Continuous Deployment on the SAAS environments running our application TOPdesk. Today we’ve improved our release rate from once every 6 months to once every week. These are the steps that brought us success.
Step 1) Set a clear and ambitious goal
In June 2015 we started out by setting a clear and ambitious company goal:
80% of our customers’ environments have to be updated weekly starting from May 2016.
Setting this goal really helped us to move forward in two ways. First, it changed the discussions from “Should we do this?” to “How can we do this?”. These discussions were much more fruitful and helped us resolve a lot of our problems. Secondly, it helped us align people throughout the organization. Doing Continuous Deployment is not a Development or Operations effort. It affects how you sell, implement and support your product. We’ve spent quite some time getting everybody on the same page.
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