Deploy is a critical step in the SAFe for DevOps Health Radar. After we have built a deployable package and tested it in a staging environment, we now want to continuously deploy our changes into the production environment. The goal is to deploy with high frequency and low risk. In this video, I explain how we achieve this and what practices enable continuous deployment.
Continuous Deployment is the final, most aggressive step in the CI/CD progression. CI proves the code builds and the unit tests pass. Continuous Delivery proves the artifact works in a production-like environment. Continuous Deployment removes the last manual checkpoint: if every test along the way is green, the change goes straight to production. No “deploy” button, no Friday-afternoon release window, no human in the loop for the final step.
In traditional software development, software is merged and tested by all developers in one big single integration step that usually takes weeks or even months. Since this only happens every few months, this step is very time-consuming.
A value stream is the path that value takes from the first idea all the way into production. It is the sum of every step, handover, and wait in between. In this video, I walk through a simple seven-step approach for identifying a value stream, measuring how it really performs, designing a target state, and then improving it step by step. The numbers in the example are simplified on purpose, so the method shines through more clearly than any single result.
