Challenges in Adopting Continuous Delivery and DevOps in a Globally Distributed Product Team

This paper presents our experiences in a project of a software engineering team spread across three countries that successfully established continuous delivery, DevOps and short release cycles with agile scrum. We had the challenge to find a way from established regulatory heavy-weight processes, long release strategies, legacy tools and technologies and people mindset towards adopting continuous delivery and DevOps. We are describing our experiences in the journey towards timeboxed release strategies compared to legacy fixed scope-based releases; value stream-based execution compared to traditional milestone-based execution; operation, test, and infrastructure as a code compared to executing these activities manually. This paper also describes experiences in transforming traditional scrum team into a DevOps team, technological landscape into lightweight tools. The authors bring their experiences as a Project Manager, Quality Manager, and an Architect, who has been an integral part of this journey. These practices have helped in stabilizing processes and methods to an extent where we have released several products versions within a year. The other business units are adopting our practices for continuous delivery and DevOps. This paper also summaries our lessons learned, and recommendations.