Path to Live (PTL) - The Whats, The Whys, and The Hows

Published in Testing

September 10, 2020

1 min read

In this article, I will be taking a look at the whats, the whys, and the hows of Path to Live (PTL) - a path from development to deployment to production.

Path to Continuous Delivery (CD) can be long and scary. Having a well thought and well-defined path to live can help make the long and scary journey to CD a lot smoother and can help you improve your deployment pipeline.

What is a the Path to Live?

PTL is a pipeline that helps teams ship quality code with confidence and reduces frictions. PTL provides visibility, transparency, and a shared understanding of how development code will be delivered to the production.

Depending on the nature of the project PTL, it should be made part of the overall quality strategy.

Why Path to Live is important?

Having a PTL is important because it:

Help visualize what is required to enable deployments to production.
Help create a shared understanding among all team members of how to go about taking code from development to production.
Help define quality gates and outline testing activities involved at each stage.
Provides a single source of truth to stakeholders; especially to engineers.
Clarifies the purpose of each environment.

How to define a Path to Live?

Asking following (but not limited to) questions :

What are all the integration points/boundaries?
Do we have the required and right number environment?
What are the minimum testing requirements at each stage?
What is the purpose of each environment?
Who should be involved at different stages of the project?
What is the measure that will qualify or promote code from one stage to the next?