Why the Golden Path of IT and Business is

Stakeholders - from development, testing, acceptance to production with approvals

Within IT, the OTAP street is nothing new. When a new project starts, requirements are drawn up to make clear what has priority, what will be placed on the backlog and what the scope of the project is. We do this to clearly communicate the expectations to both business and IT and to be able to adjust where necessary.  

We use Azure DevOps to map out our overall planning, including results. This way, you can easily connect all stakeholders, everyone sees the state of affairs on one and the same board and everyone keeps the same goal in mind. It is important to know that not every organisation has a test and acceptance environment. In our opinion, the latter is highly desirable, but we believe that a development, testing and production phase is minimally necessary.

The Product Owner or a delegate (e.g. a Business Developer) monitors the end product and is in the lead at both the beginning and the end of the process. In all phases, another stakeholder is responsible for the approval needed to proceed to the next phase.

Development

One of the principles of the Golden Path is the four-eyes principle. Changes made by a Developer are always reviewed by a fellow Developer (peer review). Our One Button Deployment enables an automatic rollout to every environment (Continuous integration and continuous delivery or CI/CD), which ensures that the rollout is done in the same, uniform manner on every environment, reducing the chance of errors to a minimum. The next phase, in this case 'testing', is released after at least four eyes have looked at the software. The most important fact in this process is that the person who changed the code or started a rollout should never be the same person who approves production.

Test and acceptance phase

In this phase, either a user or a Technical Application Manager (or a delegate thereof, such as a Security Officer) is in charge. This is proverbially the first traffic light that goes red. Testing can be seen as driving around a roundabout, after which a successful test results in a green traffic light and you can proceed to the next roundabout/phase. Within large projects, performance is tested, load tests are performed and a single application can be tested on up to ten servers, each with a hundred users. Of course, this is also fully automated.

A nice but often necessary side effect of automating everything is that the time-to-market is shortened. By having approvals in place in the right places, the ISO and security requirements for certification are fully met.

Production

The Product Owner - who also put the user stories on the backlog in the preliminary stages - is also the one who gives the final approval for the production phase. In this way, our customers are able to release in no time. Why is the Golden Path of IT and Business? Simple answer: business and IT are fully aligned through this way of working. By following the OTAP process through the Golden Path you are ahead of sluggish processes and implement a BizDevOps way of working from development to production. What does the process up to production look like in short? Read on...

The OTAP process in practice

1. The Product Owner puts the user stories on the backlog. Important for him/her is a short time-to-market to stay ahead of the competition.
2. The development team commits during sprint planning to deliver some of the most important user stories.
3. A Developer creates the code to realise the functionality described in the user story and makes a pull request. A fellow Developer performs a peer review, thereby guaranteeing the 4-eyes principle. The latter approves the pull request after completing the review and processing any review comments.
4. A 'package' of the software is created which is automatically rolled out on the development environment (CI/CD)/ The 'package' is then moved from the development environment to the following environments.
5. Within the test environment, ideally no manual testing is done because of the time-to-market. Because CI/CD has already been started, this can be done automatically and a new feature can be rolled out within a week.
6. The tester gives his approval for the next phase. If not approved, steps 3 to 5 repeat.
7. The Product Owner gives approval for production.

Both the lead time (time between putting something on the user story on the backlog and picking it up) and the cycle time (how long it takes from picking it up to production) are much shorter than 'normal'. For us, this automated way of working has become the 'new normal'.

How development delivers business value with our way of working

Our way of work? The Golden Path. We hear you thinking... What exactly is that? The best-kept secret of an Azure Developer at TeamValue', says Joost-Jan. Of course we are not going to give away everything, but we can give you a glimpse into the kitchen of the Golden Path. Check 1:13 in the video... With this gold mine of knowledge and experience, we automate everything, but it must be possible to trace who has changed what and why, and at what time. This way, an earlier version can always be called up. The ultimate goal of the Golden Path is One Button Deploy - releasing with one push of a button.

You should now know if you have your business critical applications in order in Azure DevOps and if you follow the Golden Path. Are you not following it yet but are you looking for your gold mine? Then feel free to talk to one of our experts. The next blogs? Build everything-as-code' and 'Why One Button Deploy makes your life easier' are coming soon. Stay tuned!