Low Risk Releases increase the Psychological Safety of Developing Good Explanations, which is critical to achieving Continuous Compliance.
It’s important to note that some of the benefits here are technically inconsequential. That is, they exist purely to take advantage of human psychology and how humans perceive change, entropy, and risk. This ties into Psychological Safety aspects of high performance teams. This is not to knock on any of the goals, but rather to show that devops is fundamentally at its strongest when its used to facilitate communication between everyone involved, to break down silos, and to empower the humanity behind the program.
Low Risk releases are incremental
Use Forwards and Backwards Compatible so that quick releases can happen without everything needing to be “ready”. Take inspiration from rolling releases and Live Database Migrations and Release Strategies and Versioning. This is really just applied Branch By Abstraction to yet another domain.
- Decouple deployment and release: Release Strategies and Versioning
- Reduce batch size: Incremental Change
- Optimize for Resiliance