This post was written by Matthew Skelton co-author of Team Guide to Software Operability.
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Summary: At cdchecklist.info we have made available a Trello board that contains all the key practices and recommendations from the book Continuous Delivery by Jez Humble and Dave Farley. You can clone this board to help with Continuous Delivery transformations in your own organisation.
A useful checklist for Continuous Delivery (but not a checkbox approach)
In our work with Continuous Delivery for clients in the UK and EU, we at Skelton Thatcher Consulting have found that it’s valuable to map out the scale and size of the challenges to be addressed. One simple approach is to use the subheadings in the Continuous Delivery book, many of which read as directives or things to tackle. In fact, in the past, I have literally printed out at A3 size the Contents pages of the book, stuck them to a long wall, then used the headings as a kind of roadmap or backlog of things to address:
This has the benefit of making the work required very visible; we had several useful discussions in front of the printed pages that led to better prioritisation of our backlog. It’s important to emphasise that although this provides a checklist of things to tackle, we need to avoid a “checkbox” approach to Continuous Delivery. We should not aim just to “check off” items as soon as we have a tiny bit of progress in one area, but instead use the checklist to drive discussions within and between teams.
Trello template for Continuous Delivery at cdchecklist.info – copy and use!
After work with several clients, we decided to try a digital version of the printed subheadings from the Continuous Delivery book. What we came up with was a Trello board containing all the recommendations from the CD book, arranged into Trello cards to match the book chapters.
The Trello board is available via cdchecklist.info and we’ve designed it so you can simply clone (Copy/Move) the Trello board into your own organisation’s Trello account and start using it. Several people have found it useful already:
We’d love to have feedback from anyone using the board 😊
Details
This board is a template for tracking adoption of Continuous Delivery (CD). It is based on the book Continuous Delivery by Jez Humble and Dave Farley (Addison-Wesley, 2011).
The board contains cards that are measurable recommendations from the CD book, such as Keep Absolutely Everything in Version Control. Each card is labelled with the chapter in the CD where the recommendation appears.
Not everything from the CD book is here: only the headings that are distinct practices or principles and can be assessed by engineers through discussion. There are plenty of additional things (culture, organisational, etc.) to address for effective Continuous Delivery, but doing the items here will likely represent very good progress.
Huge thanks to Jez and Dave for such an excellent book!
Note: the labels do not sort in alphabetical order – this is due to how Trello sorts label colours.
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This board is offered under a CC BY-SA 3.0 licence by Skelton Thatcher Consulting
Skelton Thatcher 
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