You may have heard of Release Management, which refers to the process of managing, planning, scheduling, and controlling software builds through various stages and environments. This includes testing and deploying software releases.
In recent years, a new term has emerged called Path to Production.
Path to Production focuses on the steps, people, tools, tasks, and output required for software requests/changes to reach production. It removes the management, planning, and scheduling aspects from release management [1].
Now that we understand what Path to Production is, let’s discuss what we will cover in this series.
I plan to examine each stage of a generic path to production, assuming a generic service that can be packaged and delivered to production, and explore how to optimize each stage.
By coincidence, I came across a tweet on Twitter last night that aligns with what we will be discussing in this series.
I was thinking about common approaches to reduce cycle time:
— Jeff Gallimore (@jgallimore) March 3, 2023
1. Speed up what (or who) is doing the work.
2. Parallelize the work.
3. Eliminate waste (i.e., get rid of work).
Are there other ways? What am I missing?
https://twitter.com/jgallimore/status/1631797981547511816?s=20
If you look at the first three points of the tweets and the answers, you’ll find the following:
- Speed up the work (or the person doing it)
- Parallelize the work
- Eliminate waste (i.e., get rid of unnecessary work)
- Standardize the work
- Eliminate or reduce wait times caused by dependencies/hand-offs
- Break down the work into smaller pieces
- Iterate relentlessly
These are almost exactly the topics we will be covering, so get ready for an intensive ride, and stay tuned for updates!
Next week, we will discuss the local development environment (i.e., your workstation).
You want to talk about this? You can find me on Twitter, LinkedIn or Mastodon.