Deployment Capability Assessment

Opportunity: Deployers

A key finding in our deployment survey was that efficiency savings were hard to achieve when a single person was responsible for deployments. This was even the case after automating deployments.

A team shouldn't depend on one person for deployments. By sharing the responsibility, you'll find your documentation and process improve, and bottlenecks are less likely.

Action: Find and train additional deployers to spread the workload. Create a team that can look at improving the deployment process.

The Octopus way: You can give users deployment permissions in the Octopus UI. They don't need technical skills or access to deployment targets. You can use this to let testers self-service pre-production deployments, or make production deployments available to more team members.

Opportunity: Lead times

Long deployment lead times are usually caused by manual steps, or an approval process that holds up the deployment. If you can reduce your lead times, you'll likely increase your deployment frequency.

Short lead times also make it easier to recover by rolling forward to a new version with a fix, or to roll back to the previous version.

Action: Map your deployment pipeline. Identify queues, blockers, and long-running tasks that you can target to reduce the time to complete a deployment.

The Octopus way: By automating the deployment process and streamlining approval steps, you can dramatically shorten lead times. Customers were 4.7x more likely to deploy in under an hour with Octopus.

Opportunity: Deployment frequency

When you deploy more often, you reduce deployment risk, increase quality, and get feedback sooner. The longer you leave between deployments, the more change builds up. Find out the many benefits of Continuous Delivery.

Action: Reduce batch sizes to increase deployment frequency. Research has found this increases software delivery performance.

The Octopus way: With automation, the overheads of deployments are far lower. You can also recover faster if there's a problem. You're 2.5x more likely to deploy on demand with Octopus.

Opportunity: Automation

You won't be surprised that we think you should automate deployments. Our deployment survey found that after introducing Octopus, our customers were:

• 2.5x more likely to deploy on demand
• 4.7x more likely to deploy in under an hour

Automated deployments are just faster and more frequent. The process is safer and more reliable.

Action: Identify manual steps in the deployment process and find ways to reduce manual intervention.

The Octopus way: All steps in a deployment should be part of the automated process. If you need approvals, Octopus can manage those for you to streamline the process.