Companies live and die by the effectiveness of their delivery pipelines. These days, all you need to start a company is have a dream and some drive. Product development can be outsourced to a dedicated team and hosted in the cloud. But are you getting something that is sustainable long term or are you getting something that looks great until it is given some closer inspection? That’s hard to tell unless you have someone technical on your team — and for a lot of companies there is not enough value to have that person there full-time.
To understand your delivery pipeline from a technical perspective, you need to understand the answer to four questions. An Element 34 Delivery Pipeline Audit can focus on one of these questions or all four.
1. What is being built?
This lens focuses on the technical implementation of your business value proposition, not the proposition itself. What frameworks are being employed, versions of libraries, application of patterns and idioms. Are there tests? Is there consistency between code, how is data being managed?
2. Where does it run?
It is easy to create an AWS account and spin up an instance. It is harder to do so securely and economically. Everything from users, compute and billing are scruitinized.
3. How does it get there?
Once the software has been built, and there is somewhere for it to run, it needs to get there somehow. TTV (Time To Value) is the most important metric in software these days. After all, if it is not delivering value to your customers, then it is detracting value. Top teams can get changes into the hands of customers within minutes.
4. Is it working?
Once the software is in the hands of users, how do you know that it is working? The last thing you want is a customer telling you that something is misbehaving. Or worse, you see a collapse of sales a week after the change has been in production. And when something goes wrong, how do you fix it?
How the Audit works
The audit has two phases. First there is a discovery phase where key stakeholders from both the business and providers are interviewed to their view on how the delivery pipeline function. With that information, an investigation of technical assets is conducted. The company will need to provide read-only access to their code repository and AWS accounts (View-only and Billing managed roles.)
Deliverable
At the conclusion of the audit you will be presented with a report detailing the state of the delivery pipeline within your organization as well as recommendations to remediate anything that was discovered that could threaten the future value of the pipeline.