Businesses these days intend to do everything faster. The reason is that only if they do things faster than their competitors, they can stay ahead of the competition. However, some businesses face issues with delivering the newly approved idea to customers that too within the shortest possible time. In the present situation, the market faces rapid changes. Customers are provided with upgraded and new products every other minute these days. Brands intend to provide quicker solutions to make life comfortable and easy for customers. 

Organizations indeed, get fresh ideas on the basis of what customers need. However, it is equally important for them to implement those ideas into their product or service. Above all, they should deliver the product at a rapid pace. They should do this before the ideas get copied or worn out. Thankfully, Agile has already improved the mindset of employees. Even, the SAFe framework has improved the processes that employees follow to achieve speedy delivery. Not just speedy delivery but also quality is already achieved by many organizations with this framework. 

Nevertheless, organizations cannot overlook some development processes and operations. In such instances, the organization and its employees should have a mindset of ongoing value delivery. To achieve this continuous value within the shortest possible time, DevOps follows the CALMR approach in the Scaled Agile Framework. You can learn more about the CALMR approach in DevOps here:

CALMR In DevOps

CALMR approach to DevOps guides the Agile Release Train towards achieving ongoing value delivery. It does it by improving:

• Culture
• Automation
• Lean Flow
• Measurement and 
• Recovery

DevOps attaches to an tactic that brings together all people involved in the value stream toward achieving amazing business results. In the Scaled Agile Framework, CALMR offers such an approach. 

Let us consider that all people who engage in the value stream not only think but also act with ongoing delivery in mind. When they do this, they can achieve the following:

•  Improved mean time to recuperate from incidents associated with the production
• Lesser frequency and severity of failures and effects
• Shortened lead time for fixes
• Improved quality of solutions
• Quicker time to market
• Reduced deployment risk with quicker learning cycles
• Improved security, quality and frequency of product innovation

A crucial element of the CALMR mindset is to realize that DevOps generally forces considerable change within established organizations. Organizations are complex with different technologies, policies, processes, values and people. So, careful attention is important to effectively nurture and mature DevOps in these atmospheres.

After more than 10 years of learning and experimenting, the DevOps community has spotted that effective DevOps encompasses a deep appreciation of CALMS. DevOps needs a guiding force towards each area in CALMS. This need not have to happen equally. But it should happen in a balanced manner. Only then, it will be possible to achieve the desired results. SAFe booms this thought with only a single change. It is that sharing is a natural element of culture. It gives the space required for recovery as a fresh component. So, the SAFe CALMR approach to DevOps looks like the picture below:

CALMR encompasses five components. These components define the excellence of DevOps. They also guide the actions and decisions of every person involved in making ongoing value delivery possible. You can learn about each element of the CALMR approach to DevOps SAFe here:

1. Culture

DevOps has been developed on a culture of group effort between silos. In SAFe, there will be an Agile Release Train with a team of Agile members. They work jointly to operate, deliver and even build the solution. As the team has a mindset of knowledge sharing and risk tolerance, everything else falls in place.

Culture is always the base for the Scaled Agile Framework. Culture should come with the following values:

• Knowledge sharing
• Risk tolerance
• Collaboration
• Customer centricity

Here, knowledge sharing denotes the sharing of learning, tools, practices, discoveries and ideas across teams and Agile Release Trains. In broader organizations working together happens and it enables skills to shift left. For risk tolerance, DevOps needs extensive recognition that each release is an experiment. It should be followed until endorsed by customers as many experiments fail.  DevOps cultures remunerate relentless improvement, ongoing learning and risk-taking.

Collaboration is where DevOps depends on the ability of security, operations and development teams to work together effectively. They should do this continuously making sure that the solutions are not only developed but are also delivered and maintained. Above all, they should ensure that these things happen in line with the frequently changing needs of the business.

Customer centricity is the value that an organization identifies for its ability to not only spot but also respond to the needs of customers. So, everyone part of the value stream should be guided by a common knowledge of their customers.

2. Automation

Automation is part of the SAFe CALMR DevOps approach. DevOps believes that manual processes are against speed. The reason is that they increase the time of processing. Also, manual processes increase the chances of errors. They increase the possibility of defects. When defects happen, they can further need time investment as rework has to be done. Therefore, the CALMR approach gives importance to the automation of the ongoing delivery pipeline. The automation results in reducing the feedback cycle and speeding up the time of processing.

For continuous delivery pipeline, DevOps uses different categories of tools that include:

• Vulnerability spotting
• Monitoring and analytics
• CI/CD
• Infrastructure as code
• Test automation
• Value stream management
• Version control

Automation of the Continuous Delivery Pipeline through an integrated toolchain can help with quickening the processing time and reducing the feedback cycles. This feedback from stakeholders, customers, infrastructure, solutions and the pipeline offers objective evidence that solutions deliver the expected value. They also show up when the solutions do not deliver the value expected. 

3. Lean Flow

DevOps does not involve shifting a huge group of changes to production. Rather, it insists on shifting to a constant flow of easier-to-control small changes. In Kanban, Flow involves restricted work in progress, small batches and taking forward to production. This does not mean automatically going live. Rather, in case of any dependencies with other code that is yet to be ready, your team can still disable your code using feature toggling. The team can do this until all items are prepared for activation. In short, Lean Flow involves:

• Bringing down the queue lengths
• Working in smaller batches
• Visualizing the restricted items in the Work-in-Progress phase

4. Measurement

This approach involves keeping track of the Key Performance Indicators. It will help evaluate progress and arrive at decisions based on the available data.

CDP should be optimized to achieve impressive business results with DevOps. For the utmost value and performance, the solutions and the processes are to be fine-tuned. The decisions on the things to be optimized, methods of optimization and the frequency can be guided by SAFe Principles.

For the success of DevOps, accurate measurement is a must. Here, the effectiveness of delivery should be measured and the information should be fed into continuous improvement efforts. Here, the common question that arises is about the metrics to be tracked. Also, you might have questions on the sources.  You can measure”

• Solution value
• Solution quality
• Pipeline flow

5. Recovery

The CALMR approach in DevOps encompasses recovery as the final yet effective component. To have ongoing delivery with value, you should follow a quick recovery and low-risk release techniques. You should gain knowledge of these techniques from the failure of your operations. To achieve quick recovery, here are some methods to follow:

• Fast Fix Forward and Roll Back

Operational failures cannot be denied. So, it is your responsibility to develop capacity in teams for quicker fixing. It is also essential to bring operations back to a stable state.

• Get Ready and Practice Failure

Your team should prepare for and practice failure. This will help bring down the impact and improve the spirit of the failure.

• Stop the Line Mentality

When an issue shows up and it should be fixed, teams must focus on fixing the issue. They should stop working on other projects or areas. In turn, they can solve issues in the fundamental stage. Also, they can prevent the issues from coming up again.

The culture, practices and principles of DevOps are part of the Scaled Agile Framework. In Agile, good quality programs are never missed out on inclusion from different sources.

Transforming to DevOps is something that needs forethought and planning. However, it will be a worthy move. CALMR is the best mindset to achieve it.

Skill challenges, infrastructure and architecture typically need considerable improvement to achieve elegant and quick recovery. Organizations often give special enterprise-level initiatives. They should do this to evolve these capabilities.

Conclusion

The CALMR approach offers a complete framework to implement DevOps. By paying attention to culture, automation, lean principles, measurement and recovery, you will gain systematic ways to align operations and development. Your organization can improve resilience, efficiency and collaboration in your DevOps practices. It is more than just a set of best practices. Rather, it is a philosophy that can guide you to deliver high-quality software with greater agility and resilience.