In today’s world, adopting agile processes is more important than ever to ensure the timely and continuous delivery of work and an advantage over the competition, and this is also true when it comes to SEO-localisation projects. Let’s take a closer look at how continuous delivery is defined and how you can achieve it.
What is continuous delivery?
Continuous delivery is the fast delivery of new content, products, or changes to existing content to the users/customers with reduced costs and within short timeframes. A solid continuous delivery cycle is usually achieved by working in small groups and employing machines to perform repetitive tasks, whilst the experts anticipate and work on any issues that arise during the project.
What are agile processes?
To achieve continuous delivery, agile processes need to be in place to speed up the process and quickly fix any faults before the finished product is delivered to the users/customers. Agile processes not only improve the quality of the work, but also the customers’ satisfaction. Moreover, they allow to get more work done, remain flexible to change and improve communication across the business. Continuous delivery requires to abandon ideas of perfection in favour of the timely completion of projects, and everyone within the group is responsible for the work.
A closer look at Scrum
There are various agile processes, but the most common is Scrum, a framework where the team — usually cross-departmental — selects a number of things to concentrate on from their ‘wish list’, and decides how to implement them over a limited amount of time (usually one month max). The team meets daily to assess the progress, and the Scrum Master is responsible for keeping the team motivated. At the end of the sprint the product needs to be ready or the changes implemented. The cycle then restarts with a new piece from the product backlog.
Agile and continuous delivery in SEO-localisation
The four stages of an agile sprint are build, deploy, test, and release, which can be applied to translation and optimisation too. More often than not, these are left to the later stage of any product launch in foreign markets. However, to allow for continuous delivery, it is important that these are taken into account during the planning stage by the Scrum Master. For instance, if we take structured data implementation as an example, agile processes would allow SEOs to break up the single task, which is often a considerable one, into smaller sprints. Likewise, during any translation project having an efficient workflow is key, especially when work is delivered on a continuous basis, as in the case of updates and reviews.
To find out more about continuous delivery and agile in SEO-localisation projects, read our brand-new e-book here.
Emily MacKenzie
Latest posts by Emily MacKenzie (see all)
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