Automated stability, faster releases: how Guarded Releases transforms development

Software development teams are under pressure to deliver new features quickly while maintaining application stability. But too often, these teams find themselves caught in unproductive work cycles. From triaging bugs to battling outages, resolving incidents can consume hours—sometimes days—of valuable development time. 

One key issue is the long mean time to recovery (MTTR), which is often exacerbated by siloed systems that don’t allow for effective communication and that make it difficult to quickly identify and fix performance problems. Instead of focusing on innovation, engineers spend their time firefighting, reducing overall productivity and efficiency.

Current state

Inefficient and reactive development cycles

For many software teams, the current state of operations is anything but efficient. When a performance issue arises—whether it’s a bug, a crash, or a performance degradation—teams must first detect the problem, then determine its root cause and finally address it. In an ideal world, this would be a simple process. In reality, the situation is far more complex. Developers often work in siloed environments where communication between systems and teams is fragmented. Metrics that could help identify problems faster are scattered across different tools, making triage slow and manual.

In addition, many teams rely on traditional application performance management (APM) systems that only offer reactive insights. By the time an alert is triggered, the damage is already done, and teams have to fix the problem while customer satisfaction plummets. This results in longer MTTR, frustrated customers, and hours that could have been dedicated to feature development being spent on manual bug resolution instead.

This process leads to a vicious cycle: more time is spent addressing issues than on proactively improving the product. Teams simply can’t afford these efficiencies in an environment where every second counts.

A Large Financial firm streamlined deployments, reducing risk and increasing efficiency—unlocking faster releases, better targeting, and measurable business impact.

Future state

Empowering teams with greater productivity and automation

Now imagine a future where software development teams can operate more efficiently. In this future, teams have full visibility into the health of their releases in real time, and potential issues are identified and resolved automatically—before they impact users. There’s no need for manual triage because the system proactively pinpoints the problem, correlates it to a specific release, and takes corrective action.

In this environment, teams no longer have to pause feature development to address production issues. Instead, they work within an automated pipeline where issues are detected, mitigated, and resolved without human intervention. This creates faster development, fewer incidents, and an empowered team that can focus on building innovative new features.

With automation, teams can achieve:

• Reduced MTTR: Issues are automatically detected and remediated, decreasing the time needed to identify and resolve problems.
• Increased velocity: Developers can focus on building new features, knowing that potential issues will be handled automatically.

Better collaboration: Siloed systems and disjointed processes are replaced with an integrated, automated solution that provides real-time visibility into the health of every release.