Summary
Your organization supports a critical business application deployed across the globe in multiple regions. You have an aggressive time to market on functionalities, and a big backlog to fill.
Continuous Planning will enable your team to provide a constant flow of functionalities by having a continuously updated plan in place, adjusted to the business requirements. Continuous Integration will implement the plan and provide feedback on development speed to ensure a realistic plan is in place.
Continuous Planning is a practice that requires planners, architects, and agile teams to integrate their plans across the enterprise on an ongoing basis. It relies on six principles:
- Value simplicity
- The manifesto for agile software development
- Design thinking
- Iterative and incremental development
- Lean management
- Estimation accuracy
Objectives and key results (OKRs) help you plan continuously and effectively with clear direction, focus, and agility. This goal-setting framework connects strategic goals set by Leadership with the day-to-day activities of execution teams.
Agile projects use Continuous Planning. They are more successful than Waterfall projects that use Static Planning because small batch releases increase the opportunities to gain knowledge.
Continuous Integration allows teams to harness collaboration, enable parallel development, minimize integration debt, and automate everything. It's a mindset, a team strategy, and a software development practice where members of a team integrate their work frequently. Each integration is verified by an automated build (including test) to detect integration errors as quickly as possible. Integration points help control product development and improve the system, and their timing is important for project health.
When done right, this approach leads to significantly reduced integration problems by catching them earlier in the process.