Bringing software products to market quickly is critical to capturing market share, boosting revenue, and delighting customers. However, high technical debt, poor leadership, and lack of alignment between different DevOps teams lead to several roadblocks in enabling enterprise agility and delivering software more predictably. 

As application development lifecycles get increasingly complex, value stream management helps teams streamline development and delivery workflows to deliver value quickly and efficiently. Modern tools help teams visualize and analyze the entire lifecycle of a product or service to identify bottlenecks, eliminate waste, and improve collaboration across teams.

GitLab is one such tool that helps teams track critical metrics, automate workflows, and enhance productivity. It ultimately accelerates the delivery of value to customers while maintaining high quality and reducing costs. Read on to uncover GitLab’s value stream capabilities.

Overview of Value Stream Management in GitLab

Value stream management is a set of practices that improves teams’ delivery of high-quality customer experiences. It helps fund, build, manage, and maintain software at scale. Identifying and prioritizing areas for improvement enables faster delivery of customer-centric products and engaging experiences.

Source: Atlassian

GitLab enables organizations to optimize the entire application development lifecycle by providing end-to-end visibility and control over their workflow from ideation to delivery. From project planning to code collaboration, CI/CD, security, and monitoring, GitLab’s integrated suite of tools helps teams identify bottlenecks, measure cycle times, and continuously improve their processes.

• Unified platform: GitLab acts as a unified platform, allowing application development teams to break silos and drive effective business outcomes. Using a single platform, development, security, and operations teams can accelerate CI/CD, reduce cycle times, and enjoy higher productivity.
• End-to-end visibility: GitLab enables teams to drive continuous improvement with visibility across the entire application delivery process. End-to-end analytics capabilities help teams optimize software delivery workflows. Value stream dashboards identify bottlenecks and opportunities for improvement, while value stream forecasting capabilities predict productivity metrics to improve planning and decision-making.
•   Optimized workflows: With GitLab, CI/CD teams get a unified view of DevSecOps metrics and achieve business goals faster. Optimized workflows help accelerate development and delivery while allowing teams to focus efforts on high-risk projects.
• GitLab Duo: GitLab Duo offers state-of-the-art AI capabilities, empowering teams to optimize application delivery processes and ship secure software faster. Developers can use the best AI models across use cases to better understand code, fix security vulnerabilities, and more.

Evaluating GitLab Capabilities

GitLab’s value stream management capabilities help simplify the application delivery toolchain and help deliver great software. It eliminates the need for teams to organize work and tools in a sequence of steps and handoffs, bridging silos and overcoming integration issues. This helps unleash collaboration across the organization, offering much-needed visibility into the workflow, process, security, and compliance across the DevSecOps lifecycle.

• Track critical metrics across the SDLC: With GitLab, teams can track key metrics throughout the software development lifecycle. They can compare best practices across teams, assess the impact of process improvements, and drill down into roadblocks to improve workflows and deliver customer value faster.
• Benchmark teams with DORA4 metrics: GitLab allows organizations to collect actionable out-of-the-box DORA metrics to benchmark engineering teams. Teams can use these metrics to improve DevOps efficiency and communicate software delivery performance updates to business stakeholders.
• Identify areas of improvement with AI: GitLab facilitates software development and allows teams to visualize flow and lifecycle metrics across DevSecOps workstreams. This helps identify inefficiencies and opportunities for workflow improvements, safeguard code, build dependencies, and release artifacts, and implement necessary guardrails for greater security.

Understanding GitLab Benefits

In addition to breaking down organizational silos, uncovering actionable insights, and optimizing workflows, GitLab offers several benefits, including:

• Faster shipment: GitLab enables development teams to accelerate shipment with intelligent capabilities. They can generate test suites faster, explain code, refactor effectively, and chat directly in the IDE or web interface.
• Improved developer experience: Tool sprawl impacts developer efficiency, but GitLab allows developers to use a single platform and carry out all development-related activities seamlessly. With capabilities that support developers at each stage of their workflow, GitLab provides real-time guidance across the entire software development lifecycle, enhancing the overall developer experience.
• Better productivity: GitLab offers AI-powered code suggestions in over 20 languages. Teams can write secure code faster in the IDE of their choice, automate routine tasks, and accelerate development cycles.
• Faster CI/CD issue resolution: GitLab Duo’s AI capabilities help save time troubleshooting issues across the SDLC. AI-assisted root cause analysis, with suggested fixes, helps resolve CI/CD job failures, allowing teams to focus on critical tasks.
• AI-powered security: With AI-powered security, teams can better understand and remediate vulnerabilities. They can get detailed explanations and auto-generated merge requests to mitigate risks and improve overall security posture.

Case Study

Business Need: Global construction services provider Hilti faced challenges in its software development projects. A lack of CI/CD and limited testing capabilities restricted visibility and made code management challenging.

Solution: To move software development in-house and enable engineering and architecture teams to conduct proper reviews, boost collaboration, and share best practices with other teams, Hilti adopted GitLab to streamline code management, improve delivery time, and enhance CI/CD capabilities.

Using GitLab’s static and dynamic application security testing, container scanning, dependency scanning, and license compliance enabled Hilti to get full access to its source code, reduce the risk of source code leakage, and increase code change capabilities. “

Benefits: GitLab allows Hilti to enjoy several advantages, including a 400% increase in code checks, 50% shorter feedback loops, and 12x faster deployments.

Accelerate Software Delivery with GitLab

As organizations struggle with challenges such as slow software delivery, poor testing, and lack of product visibility, value stream management via tools like GitLab helps craft an organizational structure designed for long-term value creation. Offering intelligent capabilities across the development lifecycle, GitLab accelerates the delivery of bug fixes and new features or products, allowing organizations to adapt quickly to market changes.

If you want to overcome the disconnect between what customers want and what is being delivered, it is time to embrace tools like GitLab to facilitate cross-team communication, improve the flow of information, and create value.