In my last post, I shared 7 Prerequisites on Whether to Improve Deployment Frequencies with DevOps. I firmly believe that CI/CD is not enough to support stable releases and also shared 5 pre-deployment priorities for Agile DevOps teams.

Let’s now talk about the technical practices that underpin and are required for more frequent deployments. If your goal is to increase the frequency of releases, here is my POV on DevOps practices that are necessary before agile teams should even consider cranking the speed knob.

The DevOps MVP for More Frequent Releases

1. Version control practices include feature flagging, branching, or other methods to enable deploying code but without allowing its use in production environments.
2. Application, database, user experience, and business process monitoring is updated with every release. The agile development process has steps and responsibilities defined that ensure monitoring is updated based on new or changed functionality.
3. IaC (Infrastructure as Code) is in place to tear up and down environments to support testing.
4. Robust automated testing is in place that can drive simple smoke tests to comprehensive end-to-end regression tests.
5. Non-functional and security testing is also automated. Automated tests are not just validating APIs and performing functional testing, they are also testing for performance, security, and other non-functional acceptance criteria.
6. CI/CD automates all (or at least the most common) steps to integrate and deploy all code, database, and other technology changes into multiple environments.
7. Rolling back failed releases, and the ability to roll back to a previous version of code is also implemented in CI/CD.