Two industry veterans have teamed up to create the sodo framework, a new step-by-step framework created to help development teams “Ship On Day One.” Sodo was designed based on the idea that high-performance engineering should be simple for all companies. It builds on Agile and DevOps principles to deliver steps and strategies for modernizing software delivery and selling executives on its importance.

“The phrase we use is “Ship On Day One” because it captures a mindset, an output, and a system of tools that allow developers to release software every day. It’s your four-word SMART goal for engineering excellence,” the company wrote in a post.

The framework was developed by Robert Duffy and Eric Schoonover, and is based on their experiences of modernizing software delivery at non-software organizations. Duffy has led teams at Amazon and Time, Inc., while Schoonover has helped teams at Microsoft, Netflix, and the Defense Digital Service.

“Whether an organization has software built into its DNA or is a non-software institution, the massive benefits of DevOps and high-performance engineering is generally understood. What isn’t widely understood is how to navigate the cultural factors. That’s where sodo comes in,” said Duffy. “Engineers have all the necessary skills to achieve DevOps success but often lack the resources and executive buy-in to do so. With the tools and training to align teams, present plans to any audience, and set clear goals, sodo helps tech leaders tackle the immediate implications of scaling DevOps, the long-term undertaking of modernizing legacy systems, and everything in between.”

According to the founders, sodo was based on 15 core capabilities spread across five development stages:

  • Collaborate
    • Knowledge sharing
    • Project management
    • Team communication
  • Code
    • Source code management
    • Build automation
  • Validate
    • Test automation
    • Continuous integration
  • Deploy
    • Continuous delivery
    • Configuration management
    • Artifact management
  • Run
    • Hosting
    • Infrastructure orchestration
    • Logging and monitoring
    • BI/analytics
    • State management

It will also provide a suite of hands-on training and education, such as sodo workshops and navigators, as well as a toolkit of blogs, videos, and step-by-step plans.

In addition, sodo is partnering  with Galvanize, which is a learning community working to providing people with skills in key technical disciplines. Under this partnership, Galvanize will add DevOps training to its current curriculum.

“Modernizing legacy applications and adopting continuous delivery is always risky because it requires changing everything; culture, process, tools, and code,” Schoonover said. “But Ship On Day One provides a step-by-step method that our customers can use to prioritize investment in their teams and their software delivery pipelines.”