Why is the Golden Path of the IT and Business

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

Nothing new in IT, the OTAP Street. Where a new project starts, requirements are drawn up to clarify what has priority, what will be on the backlog and what the scope of the project is. We do this to clearly communicate the expectations for both business and IT and to be able to make adjustments where necessary.

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

The Product Owner or a delegate (for example, 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 that is necessary to move on to the next phase.

Development

One of the principles of Golden Path is the 4-eye principle. Changes made by a Developer are always reviewed by a fellow developer (peer review). Thanks to our One Button Deploy, an automatic deployment is possible on any environment (Continuous integration and continuous delivery of CI/CD), ensuring that the deployment takes place in the same, uniform way in each environment, reducing the risk of errors to a minimum. A next phase, in this case 'testing', is released after at least 4 eyes have looked at the software. The most important thing 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

This phase involves either a user or a Technical Application Manager (or a delegate, such as a Security Officer). This is proverbially the first traffic light that is red. We can see the testing as driving around the roundabout, after which a successful test results in a green traffic light and you can drive to the next roundabout or phase. Large projects include performance testing, load tests and a single application can be tested on ten servers, each with a hundred users. Of course, this will also be 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 included the user stories on the backlog in the preliminary stages, is also the one who gives final approval for the production phase. This way, our customers are able to release in no time. Why it's the Golden Path of IT and Business Simple answer: business and IT are fully aligned because of this way of working. By following the OTAP process via the Golden Path, you are ahead of viscous processes and implement a BizDevOps way of working from development to production. So what does the process up to production look like in a nutshell? Read more...

The OTAP process in practice

1. The Product Owner puts the user stories on the backlog. Important here for him/her is a short time-to-market to stay ahead of any competition.
2. During sprint planning, the development team commits to delivering some of the most important user stories.
3. A Developer creates the code to realize the functionality described in the user story and creates a pull request. A co-developer conducts a peer review to ensure the 4-eye 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 transferred from the development environment to the following environments from this point.
5. Within the test environment, there is ideally no manual testing due to the time-to-market. Because CI/CD has already started, this can be done automatically and a new feature can be rolled out within a week.
6. The tester agrees for the next phase. If you do not agree, repeat steps 3 to 5.
7. The Product Owner agrees to produce.

Both the lead time (time between when something on the user story is placed on the backlog until the task is picked up) if the cycle time (how long it takes from the moment of picking up to production) are much shorter than 'normal'. For us, this automated way of working has become the “new normal”.

How development delivers value to the business with our way of work

Our way of work? The Golden Path. We hear you think... what exactly is that? “The best-kept secret of an Azure Developer at TeamValue,” says Joost-Jan. Of course, we're not going to reveal everything, but we'll give you a glimpse into the kitchen at The Golden Path. Check 1:13 in the video... With this gold mine of knowledge and experience, we automate everything, but then it is traceable who made changes, what and why and at what time. For example, an earlier version can always be called up. The ultimate goal of the Golden Path is One Button Deploy — release at the touch of a button.

If it's okay, you now know if you have your business-critical applications in Azure DevOps in order and whether you're following the Golden Path. Are you not following these yet but are you looking for your gold mine? Then feel free to talk to one of our experts. The following blogs? “Build Everything-as-Code” and “Why One Button Deploy Makes Your Life Easier” will be released soon. Stay tuned!