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The first step will be to do a self-assessment of the current status of your Product Team for each one of the identified capabilities.
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Define the desired end-point at the end of the next improvement cycle, a cycle can be a month, a quarter, a semester ... every team can define their improvement cycles although a good start would be to set quarterly targets to be able to define meaningful actions.
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Identify the actions you will need to achieve the desired end-point.
| CAPABILITY | CRAWL | WALK | RUN |
|---|---|---|---|
| Use version control for all production artifacts | No version control | Source code or other assets under version control | Source code or other assets under version control and all production artifacts versioned and stored in the corresponding artifact repository |
| Automate deployment processes | Manual deployment process | Partially automated deployment process | Fully automated deployment process |
| Implement test automation | Manual test script execution | Partially automated testing (unit or regression or performance tests) | Fully automated testing (unit and reliability (regression and performance tests) |
| Implement infrastructure automation | Manual deployment process | Partially automated deployment process. Provisioning is done by the teams | Fully automated deployment (infrastructure-as-code). Platform Engineering provides base images |
| Support test data management | No test data management | Partially automated test data management (e.g. manually triggered import and export of test data) | Fully automated test data management incl. strategy (e.g. consumer data only in PROD) |
| Implement continuous delivery | No continuous delivery | Partially automated delivery pipeline (e.g. automated build, test process with the manual deployment) | Fully automated pipeline (automated build, test, deployment across environments) |
| Include NFR’s in Definition of Done | No NFR's used | Ad-hoc NFR checks | Standardised NFR checklist as acceptance criteria for successful releases |
| Shift left on security | No security aspects considered during development cycle | Security aspects considered during development cycle but shifted towards release (not a priority) | Security aspects included during development cycle from the very start |
| Build for resilience | No resilience build into system | Design infrastructure and code for failure | Design infrastructure and code for failure with fully automated error recovery (self-healing) |
| Enable team for troubleshooting | No control over development lifecycle (e.g. access to PROD) | Team has full control over development lifecycle (e.g. access to PROD), but no access to logs and tools relevant for troubleshooting | Team has full control over development lifecycle (e.g. access to PROD) and full access to logs and tools for troubleshooting |
| Feature handling | No feature branches for controlled releases | Feature branches are implemented for controlled releases of distinct features | Feature branching and toggles are implemented to facilitate development, roll-out and roll-back (if needed) of usable features to production |
| Releases | Releases to all users and all sites / geographies in one go | Releases to subset of users or sites or geographies | Gradual releases to subset of users in specific sites / geographies thereby limiting the blash raduis for potential issues |
| CAPABILITY | CRAWL | WALK | RUN |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gather and implement customer feedback | No customer (internal or external) feedback gathered in development cycles | Customer feedback (internal or external) gathered on an ad-hoc basis | Customer feedback (internal or external) gathered after all releases |
| Work in small batches and deploy more frequently | Big work batch size and releases on a monthly basis or longer | Work batch size optimized for weekly releases, but deployment frequency not in sync with business requirements (e.g lead time) | Work batch size optimized for frequent releases and deployment frequency in sync with business requirements (e.g. lead time) |
| Have a lightweight change approval process | Change approval needed from multiple parties outside the team | Change approval needed within the team | No change approval needed or change approval process totally automated |
| Integrate application data into Big Data Platform | No application data transferred at all | Partial business-relevant application data transferred to Big Data Platform or provided via API | All business-relevant application data transferred to Big Data Platform |
| SRE role and activities | No clear SRE role and responsibility from Product team perspective | SRE tasks are defined and agreed from Execution (Operations, Automation, Hotfix) perspective | SRE tasks are defined for Execution and Governance areas and agreed with all stakeholders (Business, Development) |
| Postmortems | No causal analysis done for all outages | All outage RCA conducted and tied to change / release | Blameless Postmortems are conducted for all outages |
| Resiliency / Chaos Engineering | No resiliency tests are conducted | Define environment dependencies (failure points) and execute resiliency tests to ensure no customer impact | Regular chaos (resiliency) exercise scheduled basis stead state / functionality change |
| CAPABILITY | CRAWL | WALK | RUN |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monitor application and infrastructure performance | No monitoring in place | Application or infrastructure performance monitored but no alerting in place | Application and infrastructure performance is monitored; alerting in place for relevant KPI's |
| Monitor software delivery performance | No metrics monitored | Selected metrics monitored | All key metrics monitored |
| Limit Work in Progress | More than 10 features in progress | Less than 10 features in progress | Not more than 5 features in progress |
| Release governance | Product changes rolled out to production are not regulated for stability and reliability | Production changes are regulated basis stability and reliability benchmarks in test environments | Error Budget consumption regulates future releases to a product and act as gate to production changes |
| Resilience Monitoring | No KPI's defined for MTTx as per ITIL guidelines | Infra and Monitoring KPI's are defined as per ITIL guidelines for MTTx, availability, throughput, reported and deviations tracked to closure | Key monitoring signals form SLI, SLO (latency, throughput, error rate, saturation) are captured, reported and tied to product flow from business perspective |
| CAPABILITY | CRAWL | WALK | RUN |
|---|---|---|---|
| Build it and run it | Product teams build the system, operations run (and fix) it. No end to end ownership for product lifecycle. Dev and Ops staffed in separated teams | Full ownership for product teams to build and run the system supported by SRE. No L2 support needed | Full ownership for product teams to build and run the system. T-shape engineering profiles within the product teams to operate in full DevOps mode with enabled SRE in the product teams |
| Foster and enable team experimentation linked to business value | No time or resources dedicated for teams experimentations | Irregular time slots or events blocked for team experimentations (e.g. team hackathon) | Regular time slots or events blocked for team experimentations (e.g. team hackathon every month or quarter) |
| Support and facilitate collaboration among teams | No collaboration with other teams although necessary for the product | Irregular exchange between team members and or other teams (e.g. CoP, meetings, lunch, coffee, sports) | Regular exchange between among team members and other teams (e.g. CoP, meetings, lunch, coffee, sports) |
| Collaboration | No collaboration with Operations around product design from stability, reliability perspective | Product teams take design inputs (feedback) around stability, reliability from SRE experts. SRE experts are involved during testing phase (in development cycle) or post issues in production | Product architects collaborate regularly (from planning) with SRE experts to evolve the design of the product from performance, stability, reliability |
| CAPABILITY | CRAWL | WALK | RUN |
|---|---|---|---|
| Use a loosely coupled architecture | Monolithic application with a high level of interdependencies | Re-architecture in progress moving from a monolithic solution to a microservice-based architecture | System has no or very few direct dependencies to other systems. And those dependencies are tied to open standards and not tied to technologies and frameworks (e.g. Java RPC) |
| Focus on independent deployability and testability | Dependent deployability and testability across teams | Some components can be deployed and tested independently but parts of the components still have dependencies across teams | Teams can deploy and test their systems independently |
| Use established Platform Engineering solutions as a default | Custom solutions used even though provided by Platform Engineering | All solution aligned with Platform Engineering, Solution and Domain Architecture, but exceptions were granted | All solutions aligned with Platform Engineering, Solution and Domain Architecture and no custom solutions used that are provided by Platform Engineering |