Identifying bottlenecks

As is apparent from the previous example, there is a lot going on for any change that propagates through the pipeline from development to production. It is important for this process to be efficient.

As with all Agile work, keep track of what you are doing, and try to identify problem areas.

When everything is working as it should, a commit to the code repository should result in the change being deployed to integration test servers within a 15-minute time span.

When things are not working well, a deploy can take days of unexpected hassles. Here are some possible causes:

• Database schema changes.
• Test data doesn't match expectations.
• Deploys are person dependent, and the person wasn't available.
• There is unnecessary red tape associated with propagating changes.
• Your changes aren't small and therefore require a lot of work to deploy safely. This might be because your architecture is basically a monolith.

We will examine these challenges further in the chapters ahead.