Faster time to market and shorter cycle times are a major challenge that is faced by development teams in every industry.
1- Cycle Time - Improve IT responsiveness to business demand
What challenges do I (VP Apps) face?
Meeting the demand from the business to deliver new capabilities, enhancements, bug fixes, and patches needed to remain competitive. We lack the capacity to do all the work and always have to prioritize which thing we will work on. The business thinks we’re too slow and can’t respond fast enough. They want it all, and they want it now. They think our projects are simply too expensive.
We have constraints and bottlenecks that create project conflicts, causing project flows to stop and wait for key resources (environments, SMEs, etc.)
Bureaucracy (manual handoffs and processes between teams) slows us down and prevents us from doing the ‘real work’ of shipping code.
Quality - we’re swamped fixing defects, dealing with incidents (support), and can’t pay down our technical debt.
What does it look like today (problems faced)?
Unhappy business leaders, unhappy customers
Rework and loss of productivity because teams cannot collaborate with each other
The backlog of high priority business features waiting to be implemented
What are the negative consequences to the business?
Lost revenue and opportunities - inability to react fast to changing market needs
Cost and schedule overruns
Build up of technical debt - example: unresolved vulnerabilities and defects
What does it look like if a magic wand were to solve it today?
Business demand to meet customer needs quickly delivered
Teams collaborate and deliver without conflicts
The backlog of business demand is both manageable and acceptable for our business partners/customers.
What would be the positive outcomes for the business?
Faster response time and ability to deliver to changing market needs
Projects delivered on time and budget
Developers spend more time delivering new functionality than fixing defects
What capabilities are required to make this happen?
Development projects/teams have capacity to pick up new requirements, code, test and deliver, meeting the business demand without adding to the backlog.
The ability for all teams (dev, test, security, ops) to work together on same project deliverables at the same time with a common view
All SDLC capabilities work together - no need to stitch together different tools freeing up developers time to focus on delivering features
How would you measure success (metrics)
Cycle time (the time from when a new feature is requested to when it is delivered)
Reduction in number of projects delayed/stalled
Number of engineer hours spent on new features versus the integration and maintenance of toolchain
How does GitLab help solve the problem?
Integrated project management, SCM and robust automation enable development teams to rapidly move from issue to code to test. GitLab’s CI/CD enables teams to rapidly test each of their changes and then move those changes into testing environments using containers and Kubernetes.
Integrated collaboration and built-in workflow between teams
Single application for the entire SDLC - no need to integrate 9+ tool categories
Why are we better than the competition?
Only GitLab is a complete DevOps platform, delivered as a single application that enables teams to collaborate, share and deliver software.
GitLab has 2/3 market share in the self-managed Git market
GitLab is not only the industry-leading CI solution (per Forrester), but our CI is closely coupled to how the project management, source code management, testing,
