What is Continuous Delivery?
Continuous Delivery (CD) becomes more and more important in software development. CD does not only help to make deployments more predictable and reliable, it also reduces the time to market. But what is Continuous Delivery exactly?
What is Continuous Delivery?
Continuous Delivery is a software development approach where teams produce software in short cycles, which ensures that the software can be released reliably at any time. It focusses on building, testing and releasing software fast and frequently. The main goal of Continuous Delivery is to make deployments (no matter if it’s on a large- or small scale) as boring and as predictable as possible. This way, deployments become routine affairs and can be performed on demand.
To achieve this, we need to ensure that our code is always in a deployable state, no matter how many developers are making changes on a daily basis. That’s why we completely remove the integration, testing and hardening phases that normally come after “development complete”.
The benefits of Continuous Delivery
#1 Low risk releases
The main goal of Continuous Delivery is to make software releases low-risk and painless events that can be executed on demand. With techniques like blue-green deployments, it is easy to achieve zero-downtime deployments that are undetectable to users.
#2 Shorter time to market
When teams work together to automate the build and deployment environment, and testing processes, developers can incorporate integration and regression testing into their daily work and completely remove these phases. By eliminating the integration, testing and hardening phases, you will save a lot of time (sometimes even months).
#3 Higher quality software
When developers have automated testing tools (Test Automation) that discover regressions within minutes, teams are able to focus more on higher-level testing activities such as exploratory testing, usability testing, and performance and security testing. With a deployment pipeline, these activities can be performed constantly throughout the delivery process. This ensures that quality is built into the software from the start.
#4 Continuous experimentation
Continuous Delivery enables teams to work in small batches. This means that, throughout the full delivery lifecycle, you can get feedback from the users. Using techniques like A/B testing, teams are able to have a hypothesis-driven approach to product development where they can test ideas with the users before building the full feature. Because of these data-driven decisions, they are able to avoid the features that deliver no business value.
#5 Enabling Business Agility
Continuous Delivery increases the Business Agility because you are able to deploy anytime with low risk. Moreover, bugs and other issues can easily be identified and corrected because feedback for changes is immediate.
#6 Happier teams
Research has shown that Continuous Delivery makes new releases less stressful. Moreover, software teams can engage more with users when releasing more frequently, to learn which ideas work and which don’t. By removing the painful, low-value, activities associated with software delivery, teams can focus on what matters most: continuously satisfy customers.
How to start with Continuous Delivery?
Now we know the answer to “What is Continuous Delivery” and “What are its benefits”, we can go to the next step: How do you start?
1. Know your landscape
The first step to improvement is to know where you are. Start assessing your current teams, development process and your release process. A good tool to use would be Value Stream Mapping or you could do this by visualizing your current release process.
In this, you also need to assess your organizational structure (do you have silo’s?), application architecture, test practices, and technology landscape.
2. Where do you want to go?
With the insights of your assessment, together with your organizational objectives, define the goals that you want to achieve with Continuous Delivery. So typically, this includes:
- KPI’s
- Maturity models
- Target technology landscape (how does your ideal technology landscape look like?)
- Desired people and team skills (for instance knowledge Test Automation or on concepts like TDD, IaC, Agile way of working)
3. Pave the way before you can walk
Make it easy for your development teams to onboard on your new tool stack/target tool stack. Getting access to the tools should not become a bottleneck for development teams to make progress in implementing CD.
4. Implement
Start small (for instance with one team) and make tangible progress before you start scaling. The first step when implementing Continuous Delivery is Continuous Integration. In this, automation is key (Test Automation).
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Our Continuous Delivery services
DevOn helps organizations to radically improve their software development. We help them to reap the benefits of Continuous Delivery through consultancy (Continuous Delivery in 90 Days) and training so they can stay ahead of their competitors.
Having trouble finding enough experienced developers who can help you with software development? DevOn can also help your organization with this by offering AI Powered High-Performance Teams. If you would like to know more, please contact us!
