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5 Steps to Continuous Delivery and APM Success

Solving the Continuous Delivery Mystery

Continuous delivery, continuous deployment and continuous integration — what do these all mean and are they the same thing, or even related? There is a lot of confusion around continuous delivery, but what isn't a mystery is that this topic and manner of releasing applications into production is a hot button issue in the industry right now.

Continuous delivery is defined as releasing into production high quality software quickly, through build, test and deployment automation. Basically the process allows organizations to release software into the “wild” in minutes, opposed to days or even weeks.

Test automation is the sticky point for many organizations opposed to continuous delivery — yes, we said opposed. Similar to how many IT organizations balked at adopting Agile development at first, organizations are doing the same for continuous delivery. The reason: it is a relatively new paradigm shift to traditional software deployment. The controversy: there is much less emphasis on the testing phase of the process than with more traditional software development and release.

What everyone can agree on is the driving force behind continuous delivery: the speed that software can be delivered into production is unmatched compared to traditional software release trains.

DevOps, Continuous Integration and Lean Computing

There are three aspects that make up continuous delivery: DevOps, continuous integration and lean computing – tying these together is when the magic happens.

The DevOps community focuses on infrastructure as code, monitoring and improved collaboration between the houses of development, test and operations.

Lean is about innovating efficiently, soliciting feedback from customers as quickly as possible and leveraging technical competences such as continuous integration, comprehensive configuration management, automation of build, test, provision and deploy processes.

Like any continuous improvement, it should be achieved incrementally, taking into account where folks are starting from and their ability to effect changes and adopt them. The tools, practices and patterns are now available to support this, and Serena uniquely orchestrates enterprise agility.

Incidentally the KPI or metric we should be measuring is the cycle time for the software delivery process (implies a continuous delivery workflow).

For continuous integration, there is a significant cost savings to consider. Since Continuous Integration is in the early development cycle, many changes are tested frequently with feedback immediately going the development team. Multiple changes from multiple developers are developed and tested with many deployments daily.

The earlier in the development, test and release cycle that a problem is identified and a fix developed, the lower the cost. It is much more expensive to fix problems after the application is in late-stage testing, pre-production, or production. Therefore, effective continuous integration reduces costs and reduces risks.

Today’s successful business is lean, efficient and lives online. It is an agile enterprise, relying on non-traditional IT imperatives such as Cloud, mobile and social computing. These companies are defined by the new and enhanced solutions empowering their IT stakeholders. From operating on mobile phones and tablets, to automating the release of their applications both on-premises and to the Cloud, agile enterprises live and breathe efficiency. Continuous deployment delivers the speed and agility these companies crave. They do not have time to wait for three-month development and release cycles they need software deployed in minutes.

While there is an interesting angle around APM and measuring performance, adoption, etc. once deployed as an ex development manager, there is still much improvement available in the area of test automation and in particular the adoption of TDD (Test Driven Development) practices.

We have come up with the five steps organizations can take to optimize continuous delivery:

Step 1: Make the release management process and workflow accessible for many different IT functions through a common function portal for: Business, Development, Test/QA, DevOps, Release, IT Operations and IT Service Management.

Step 2: Document detailed requirements in demand, stories and the requirements management process.

Step 3: Connect the requirements, development, and release processes. Ensure that the only changes that are released are those that have been defined by requirements management and approved by the business.

Step 4: Orchestrate the release management process with Development so that newly developed code from multiple development environments flows smoothly into the common release management process.

Step 5: Improve release management flexibility through improved support of:

- Traditional Stage-Gate QA methodology

- Modern Continuous Delivery QA methodology

- Support for many different environments for deployments (test, SIT, UAT, Staging, Pre-Prod, Production)

- Support for multiple platforms such as, Windows, Linux, Unix, Mainframe

For companies that want to take this developer-driven approach, there has to be an understanding of the changes required in getting to continuous delivery and how it affects the whole process for getting new software and updates out to the organization.  

The benefit of going down this route is that IT as a whole can be more nimble in responding to a changing market, whether this is launching new services or expanding available functionality. With a lot more businesses looking at how to expand the ethos of agile from development into their wider organization, this is a great opportunity to show the rest of the world how things can and should be done.

ABOUT Ashley Owen

Ashley (Ash) Owen is Serena Software’s Director of Orchestrated ALM Strategy for the ALM Business, providing product management assistance, field support and solution strategy & advice to our customers, prospects and partners. Extensive experience in the successful design and implementation of ALM solutions across Europe, APAC and America.



Ash has spent more than 23 years in Application Lifecycle Management and Software Change and Configuration Management markets. Ash has a singular focus on improving efficiency, automation and traceability within both Enterprise IT and Embedded Systems environments.

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Traditional observability requires users to leap across different platforms or tools for metrics, logs, or traces and related issues manually, which is very time-consuming, so as to reasonably ascertain the root cause. Observability 2.0 fixes this by unifying all telemetry data, logs, metrics, and traces into a single, context-rich pipeline that flows into one smart platform. But this is far from just having a bunch of additional data; this data is actionable, predictive, and tied to revenue realization ...

5 Steps to Continuous Delivery and APM Success

Solving the Continuous Delivery Mystery

Continuous delivery, continuous deployment and continuous integration — what do these all mean and are they the same thing, or even related? There is a lot of confusion around continuous delivery, but what isn't a mystery is that this topic and manner of releasing applications into production is a hot button issue in the industry right now.

Continuous delivery is defined as releasing into production high quality software quickly, through build, test and deployment automation. Basically the process allows organizations to release software into the “wild” in minutes, opposed to days or even weeks.

Test automation is the sticky point for many organizations opposed to continuous delivery — yes, we said opposed. Similar to how many IT organizations balked at adopting Agile development at first, organizations are doing the same for continuous delivery. The reason: it is a relatively new paradigm shift to traditional software deployment. The controversy: there is much less emphasis on the testing phase of the process than with more traditional software development and release.

What everyone can agree on is the driving force behind continuous delivery: the speed that software can be delivered into production is unmatched compared to traditional software release trains.

DevOps, Continuous Integration and Lean Computing

There are three aspects that make up continuous delivery: DevOps, continuous integration and lean computing – tying these together is when the magic happens.

The DevOps community focuses on infrastructure as code, monitoring and improved collaboration between the houses of development, test and operations.

Lean is about innovating efficiently, soliciting feedback from customers as quickly as possible and leveraging technical competences such as continuous integration, comprehensive configuration management, automation of build, test, provision and deploy processes.

Like any continuous improvement, it should be achieved incrementally, taking into account where folks are starting from and their ability to effect changes and adopt them. The tools, practices and patterns are now available to support this, and Serena uniquely orchestrates enterprise agility.

Incidentally the KPI or metric we should be measuring is the cycle time for the software delivery process (implies a continuous delivery workflow).

For continuous integration, there is a significant cost savings to consider. Since Continuous Integration is in the early development cycle, many changes are tested frequently with feedback immediately going the development team. Multiple changes from multiple developers are developed and tested with many deployments daily.

The earlier in the development, test and release cycle that a problem is identified and a fix developed, the lower the cost. It is much more expensive to fix problems after the application is in late-stage testing, pre-production, or production. Therefore, effective continuous integration reduces costs and reduces risks.

Today’s successful business is lean, efficient and lives online. It is an agile enterprise, relying on non-traditional IT imperatives such as Cloud, mobile and social computing. These companies are defined by the new and enhanced solutions empowering their IT stakeholders. From operating on mobile phones and tablets, to automating the release of their applications both on-premises and to the Cloud, agile enterprises live and breathe efficiency. Continuous deployment delivers the speed and agility these companies crave. They do not have time to wait for three-month development and release cycles they need software deployed in minutes.

While there is an interesting angle around APM and measuring performance, adoption, etc. once deployed as an ex development manager, there is still much improvement available in the area of test automation and in particular the adoption of TDD (Test Driven Development) practices.

We have come up with the five steps organizations can take to optimize continuous delivery:

Step 1: Make the release management process and workflow accessible for many different IT functions through a common function portal for: Business, Development, Test/QA, DevOps, Release, IT Operations and IT Service Management.

Step 2: Document detailed requirements in demand, stories and the requirements management process.

Step 3: Connect the requirements, development, and release processes. Ensure that the only changes that are released are those that have been defined by requirements management and approved by the business.

Step 4: Orchestrate the release management process with Development so that newly developed code from multiple development environments flows smoothly into the common release management process.

Step 5: Improve release management flexibility through improved support of:

- Traditional Stage-Gate QA methodology

- Modern Continuous Delivery QA methodology

- Support for many different environments for deployments (test, SIT, UAT, Staging, Pre-Prod, Production)

- Support for multiple platforms such as, Windows, Linux, Unix, Mainframe

For companies that want to take this developer-driven approach, there has to be an understanding of the changes required in getting to continuous delivery and how it affects the whole process for getting new software and updates out to the organization.  

The benefit of going down this route is that IT as a whole can be more nimble in responding to a changing market, whether this is launching new services or expanding available functionality. With a lot more businesses looking at how to expand the ethos of agile from development into their wider organization, this is a great opportunity to show the rest of the world how things can and should be done.

ABOUT Ashley Owen

Ashley (Ash) Owen is Serena Software’s Director of Orchestrated ALM Strategy for the ALM Business, providing product management assistance, field support and solution strategy & advice to our customers, prospects and partners. Extensive experience in the successful design and implementation of ALM solutions across Europe, APAC and America.



Ash has spent more than 23 years in Application Lifecycle Management and Software Change and Configuration Management markets. Ash has a singular focus on improving efficiency, automation and traceability within both Enterprise IT and Embedded Systems environments.

Hot Topics

The Latest

As artificial intelligence (AI) adoption gains momentum, network readiness is emerging as a critical success factor. AI workloads generate unpredictable bursts of traffic, demanding high-speed connectivity that is low latency and lossless. AI adoption will require upgrades and optimizations in data center networks and wide-area networks (WANs). This is prompting enterprise IT teams to rethink, re-architect, and upgrade their data center and WANs to support AI-driven operations ...

Artificial intelligence (AI) is core to observability practices, with some 41% of respondents reporting AI adoption as a core driver of observability, according to the State of Observability for Financial Services and Insurance report from New Relic ...

Application performance monitoring (APM) is a game of catching up — building dashboards, setting thresholds, tuning alerts, and manually correlating metrics to root causes. In the early days, this straightforward model worked as applications were simpler, stacks more predictable, and telemetry was manageable. Today, the landscape has shifted, and more assertive tools are needed ...

Cloud adoption has accelerated, but backup strategies haven't always kept pace. Many organizations continue to rely on backup strategies that were either lifted directly from on-prem environments or use cloud-native tools in limited, DR-focused ways ... Eon uncovered a handful of critical gaps regarding how organizations approach cloud backup. To capture these prevailing winds, we gathered insights from 150+ IT and cloud leaders at the recent Google Cloud Next conference, which we've compiled into the 2025 State of Cloud Data Backup ...

Private clouds are no longer playing catch-up, and public clouds are no longer the default as organizations recalibrate their cloud strategies, according to the Private Cloud Outlook 2025 report from Broadcom. More than half (53%) of survey respondents say private cloud is their top priority for deploying new workloads over the next three years, while 69% are considering workload repatriation from public to private cloud, with one-third having already done so ...

As organizations chase productivity gains from generative AI, teams are overwhelmingly focused on improving delivery speed (45%) over enhancing software quality (13%), according to the Quality Transformation Report from Tricentis ...

Back in March of this year ... MongoDB's stock price took a serious tumble ... In my opinion, it reflects a deeper structural issue in enterprise software economics altogether — vendor lock-in ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 15, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses Do-It-Yourself Network Automation ... 

Zero-day vulnerabilities — security flaws that are exploited before developers even know they exist — pose one of the greatest risks to modern organizations. Recently, such vulnerabilities have been discovered in well-known VPN systems like Ivanti and Fortinet, highlighting just how outdated these legacy technologies have become in defending against fast-evolving cyber threats ... To protect digital assets and remote workers in today's environment, companies need more than patchwork solutions. They need architecture that is secure by design ...

Traditional observability requires users to leap across different platforms or tools for metrics, logs, or traces and related issues manually, which is very time-consuming, so as to reasonably ascertain the root cause. Observability 2.0 fixes this by unifying all telemetry data, logs, metrics, and traces into a single, context-rich pipeline that flows into one smart platform. But this is far from just having a bunch of additional data; this data is actionable, predictive, and tied to revenue realization ...