What’s In a Software Delivery Process?

When crafting a Software Delivery Process for your team or organization it’s important to identify what you want it to be.

I’m not talking about whether it’s agile, waterfall, or some other variant. I’m talking about what matters to the stakeholders of that process and those that are working within it. Some call these values, tenets, ideas, inspiration – you can use whatever word you want, but the goal is still the same – identifying what matters to the process you are creating.

If you’re stuck on ideas, here are a few;

• Predictability – knowing when we are going to deliver.
• Transparency – everyone sees the same thing, nothing is hidden
• Trust – we are open and honest with each other
• Simplicity – the process can’t be a burden
• Visibility – it should be straightforward how we see the process and understand what it is
• Consistency – it should be reproduceable and consistent
• Ownership – people should own it
• Accountability – people should be accountable for their decisions that they make
• Stable – it shouldn’t fall apart at first pass of an issue
• Portable – we should be able to apply to all of our other projects and products relatively easily

There are more words that you can probably come up with pretty easily, the goal is to understand why you have picked those words and what do they matter to your process.

If you don’t know why you are building a process, then all you are introducing is a set of rules and regulations that no one understands why you are implementing.

The best thing about understanding why you as a team are building a process, is being able to remind each other why you are doing this, when things get rough (and they will get rough, because change is never easy).