Building With Confidence: The Enterprise Guide to De-risking Your Application Delivery

We all know the story: your team has spent months developing a critical application update, only for something to go wrong on deployment day, despite all the testing. Systems crash, users complain, and those of us leading the change struggle to take control to reduce the risk of losing both money and trust.

While it's a situation we’re all trying to avoid, it’s one that we see far too often - especially in enterprises trying to balance innovation with stability.

As we all navigate high-pressure digital environments, delivering applications quickly and safely can feel like trying to accelerate and brake at the same time. But maybe there's a better way. What if you could increase delivery speed while still reducing risk?

From stabilising risk coverage to optimising release speed — a guide to smarter application delivery

For many enterprise organisations, application delivery is - by necessity - a series of frustrating trade-offs. Your quality assurance teams push for more testing while the business stakeholders are demanding faster releases. Meanwhile, your security teams raise concerns that can feel like roadblocks to any kind of progress whatsoever.

While the traditional waterfall approach minimises risk, it moves too slowly for many of the demands on our organisations today. On the other hand, adopting agile methodologies without proper safety measures is likely to create vulnerabilities.

The Hidden Costs of Poor Risk Coverage

What many leaders don't fully appreciate is the hidden costs of inadequate risk management in application delivery. Statistics from Tricentis show that 78% of production errors can be attributed to weak risk visibility during the delivery process.

On top of this, the increase in use of packaged and SaaS applications adds new layers of complexity to testing, which then increases risk, cost and - of course - timescales.

Having a clear understanding of your delivery, its risks, and potential solutions, is essential for successful implementation. But how do you ensure that visibility and reduce these risks without compromising delivery speed?

1. Stabilising: Test What Matters to Strengthen Your Foundations

The first step in any development is understanding your current infrastructure, which we always start with and cover in our post, "Essential Steps for Improving Digital Experiences." Then:

• Having clarified your critical path, focus your testing and defect prevention here to reduce the risks in your digital transformation. By implementing risk-based testing that prioritises business-essential functions and high-traffic user journeys instead of attempting to test everything equally, you’ll reduce critical defects on implementation.

• Keep control of your deployment with clear visibility and decision-making authority over releases. Having clear criteria for deployment readiness and governance checkpoints will reduce emergency rollbacks, giving stakeholders confidence that when something goes live, it's genuinely ready.

2. Standardising: Progression Through Processes and Automation

Standardisation of processes provides numerous benefits wherever it is implemented. Automation provides additional benefits, allowing these standardised processes to be replayed and reported more efficiently.

• Tricentis research shows that manual testing results in a 40% loss of savings, with automated testing providing real efficiencies. Beyond the direct cost savings, standardised automated tests also create consistent, repeatable quality checkpoints, eliminating the variability of manual testing and reducing the risk of individuals claiming "it works on my machine". 

• Automation frameworks also reduce test cycle times and enable continuous testing in environments where changes are ongoing, again providing huge time and cost savings. With automated regression suites and immediate feedback for development teams, test cycles can be reduced from days to hours.

3. Optimising: Reducing Friction With Intelligence-Driven Delivery

Early risk assessments and strategic test automation create a forward-looking view that anticipates challenges rather than reacting to them. This proactive stance can fundamentally change how your teams handle their development.

• When teams are able to prevent problems rather than scrambling to fix them after they occur, the entire delivery dynamic changes. By integrating validation throughout the development lifecycle rather than treating it as a final checkpoint, your teams will catch issues when they're still inexpensive to address. 

• 90% of hypercare costs are avoidable with better readiness. The intensive support period following deployments represents one of the largest costs in application delivery, but these costs can be reduced with improved readiness and validation. 

Application Delivery, Your Business Advantage

The journey from stabilising to standardising to optimising your application delivery isn't just about technical improvements—it's about fundamentally changing how your business delivers value. 

When implemented effectively, this approach creates a virtuous cycle with impressive business outcomes:

• Faster releases don't have to mean higher risk. You can shorten your time-to-market while also reducing production incidents. 

• Testing costs decrease while coverage improves. By focusing on what matters most and automating effectively, your testing will be more economical and more thorough.

• Innovation capacity grows as resources shift from firefighting to building. When you are spending less time fixing problems, you’ll have more to invest in new initiatives.

When digital experience increasingly defines customer satisfaction and employee productivity, the ability to deliver changes rapidly, safely, and predictably is a strategic asset. Is it one you’re looking for?

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About the Author 

I'm Terry Chana. I am an innovation strategist that connects customer, employee and brand experiences. My passion lies in building ecosystems to solve business problems by combining creativity and tec