This article covers the concept of automated change management for software engineering teams who want to deliver software change n times a day.
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We all might have been in that situation that making the actual software change takes just a few hours, but getting approval to go live takes almost two weeks!?
It is the story of a painful go-live experience for an engineering team who is ready to release their changes but needs to go through lengthy organisation red-tapes to get 10 approvals by filling the same forms with so much information that may or may not be even used. As change management is not fully aware of what’s in the change and because they get so many of these requests, the tendency might be to just decline some of these requests with no clear reason for the team, until they are convinced that the change is safe after a lot of back and forth, and sometimes by just seeing how committed you are to go live!
If this sounds familiar, this is the story of many companies who implemented modern DevOps Practices, without paying much attention to change management.
There was a time companies with large platforms, major releases every few months, and interconnected software foundations, needed to have a central team in charge of change management because a change in one platform would have an impact on the other, however that model doesn’t make sense anymore. These days software platforms have adopted microservices architecture with CI/CD pipelines, piloting mechanisms and feature flags, and can release software quite independently but due to those outdated change management processes and long lead times, they can’t release daily or hourly.
If we wanted to talk about a better pipeline now perhaps we could just assume next time someone asked you the status of a bug fix, the answer would be: we’ve just made the change, the change request was automatically approved, and the estimated go-live time is 10 minutes. You will get a notification on your phone when it’s ready to test in prod, as you are a pilot user.
