ThoughtWorks, Inc. (www.thoughtworks.com), the global leader in enterprise Agile development services, today announced its Continuous Delivery Assessment service at the Agile2011 conference. The service provides insight into an organization’s current maturity in software delivery practices, and results in a plan to improve them. This helps customers reduce the risks of software deployments, improve the quality of the software delivered and reduce time-to-market, thus enabling them to respond faster to customer and market demands.
“With Lean and Agile methods extending deeper into enterprise IT organizations in response to strong competitive pressures, Continuous Delivery provides the technical principles and practices needed to make sure that organizations can actually get the results they want,” said Jez Humble, principal at ThoughtWorks Studios. “With our Continuous Delivery Assessment service we perform a health check to determine the condition of a customer’s technical practices and organizational alignment, and then work with them to put a plan in place which will allow them to achieve their goals.”
ThoughtWorks offers end-to-end Continuous Delivery services that enable enterprises to deliver high quality, strategic software fast and repeatedly, while reducing the risk of the delivery process through improved collaboration and aggressive automation of the software build, test, deployment and infrastructure management processes. Developed and pioneered by ThoughtWorks’ global delivery teams and outlined in Jez Humble and David Farley’s breakthrough book, Continuous Delivery, it reduces software delivery to a “non-event,” rather than the more common “big bang” release that is risky and chaotic. The goal of Continuous Delivery is to create a software development process that is predictable and automated such that releases can be performed on demand by business stakeholders. This makes software delivery responsive, fast and reliable so that IT becomes a powerful competitive advantage for the business.
The ThoughtWorks Continuous Delivery Assessment is a one-to-three week onsite engagement that is conducted in a highly collaborative manner through a series of workshops, interviews and situational observations involving everyone who contributes to the software delivery process. It provides IT organizations with a clear understanding of current capabilities, processes and technologies, detailed analysis of the gaps between the current state of software delivery and the desired future state, and recommendations on how to evolve toward integrated Continuous Delivery practices. Strategies are developed to incrementally deploy Continuous Delivery and to scale pilot projects across the IT organization.
Areas that are assessed during a Continuous Delivery Assessment engagement include:
• Development practices and tools
• Build/deploy/release management, automation and tools
• Testing strategy and automation
• Requirements definition, management and lifecycle
• Delivery methodology
• Organizational alignment
In addition, ThoughtWorks uses its Continuous Delivery Maturity Model method to provide a framework for analyzing the lifecycle process, from writing a line of code until that code is released to production. Value Stream Mapping techniques are used to map the flow from a business idea through return-on-investment analysis, requirements definition, development, testing and release.
“We are pleased to provide customers with a highly focused service offering that helps organizations develop clear strategies for adopting Continuous Delivery,” said Tim Brown, ThoughtWorks’ Continuous Delivery practice lead for the Americas. “Enterprises have a great opportunity to streamline and automate their entire idea-to-value chain, reduce waste and build the right thing. This assessment is the first step on the path to greater business agility and performance achievable through Continuous Delivery.”
For more information about the ThoughtWorks Continuous Delivery Assessment services please visit:
http://www.thoughtworks.com/consulting/continuous-delivery. To learn more about ThoughtWorks Studios’ Go product for Continuous Delivery, please visit: http://www.thoughtworks-studios.com/go-agile-release-management.
