Continuous Delivery
Continuous Delivery reduces waste and makes releases boring. Foster a collaborative working relationship between Development, Testing and IT Operations (aka DevOps) resulting in the fast flow of planned work, while simultaneously increasing the Operability of the production environment.
“Challenges in delivering innovative solutions are almost never about the technology. They are about the people”
Continuous Delivery is the natural evolution of Continuous Integration: release any number of versions into production at the push of a button.
There are many useful principles and practices like Value Stream Mapping, Deployment Pipelines, Acceptance Test Driven Development, Zero-downtime Releases and Incremental Development. But “challenges in delivering innovative solutions are almost never about the technology. They are about the people”.
As such, choosing the right tools must only come after having tackled the people element: development, testing and operational management must be integrated. The organisation must realise that this isn’t a technology problem, it’s a cultural one, since Continuous Delivery strives to get from concept to cash and therefore touches every department in the organisation.
Having worked in and with companies and people who pioneered both Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery, we are perfectly positioned to help you and your organisation understand what CD is and why and how to achieve it.
Aside from our own Insights subsection dedicated to Continuous Delivery, and our post “Continuous Delivery Pipelines: GoCD vs Jenkins”, there are many useful resources readily available online, but we believe the best way to get started is to hear it from the horse’s mouth:
The official Continuous Delivery website by Jez Humble
The book “Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation” by Jez Humble and David Farley
And one of the many video introductions to Continuous Delivery by Jez Humble: