Why continuous delivery

It will discuss the work that lies ahead and the benefits it will yield to ship software using CD pipelines. Continuous delivery improves velocity, productivity, and sustainability of software development teams. Automated software delivery pipelines help organizations respond to market changes better.

The need for speed is of utmost importance to reduce shelf time of new features. With a low Time2Market, organizations have a better chance to outmaneuver their competition and stay in business. Remember that speed by itself is not a success metric. Without quality, speed is useless.

There is no value in having continuous delivery pipelines shoot erroneous code into production at speed. So, in the world of continuous delivery, velocity means responsible speed, and not suicidal speed. Productivity increases when tedious and repetitive tasks, like filling out a bug report for every defect discovered, can be performed by pipelines instead of humans. This lets teams focus on vision while pipelines do the execution. Teams investigate issues reported by their pipelines and once they commit the fix, pipelines run again to validate whether the problem was fixed and if new problems were inadvertently introduced.

Businesses aim to win marathons, not just sprints. We know that cutting ahead of the pack takes grit. Consistently staying ahead of the pack can be even harder. It takes discipline and rigor. Every organization, whether or not a tech company, is using technology to differentiate. Automated pipelines reduce manual labor and lead to eventual savings since personnel is more expensive than tools. The steep upfront investment can cause concern to inexperienced leadership, however, well-designed pipelines position organizations to innovate better and faster to meet their customers' needs.

CD provides the business with more flexibility in how it delivers features and fixes. Specific sets of features can be released to specific customers, or released to a subset of customers, to ensure they function and scale as designed.

Features can be tested and developed, but left dormant in the product, baking for multiple releases. Your marketing department wants that "big splash" at the yearly industry convention? With continuous delivery, it's not only possible, it's a trivial request. While we firmly believe continuous delivery is the right thing to do, it can be challenging for organizations to design and build resilient continuous delivery pipelines.

Because CD requires a large overhaul in technical processes, operational culture, and organizational thinking, it can often feel like there's a large hurdle to getting started. The fact that it requires a hefty amount of investment in a company's software delivery infrastructure that may have been neglected over the years, can make it an even more bitter pill to swallow. There are many problems that organizations face and the following three are the most common pitfalls - budget, people, and priority.

Construction of continuous delivery pipelines consumes your best people. This is not a side project whose cost can be shoved under the carpet. I have always been surprised at how some organizations start out by allocating junior members and by cutting corners on purchasing modern tools. At some point, they course correct and assign their senior architects to invest in architecture decoupling and resilient continuous delivery pipelines.

Based on your vision, set aside an appropriate amount of funds to make sure execution is uninterrupted. Deliver a continuous delivery pipeline MVP minimum viable product and then scale it throughout your organization. Teams should fearlessly automate themselves out of their jobs, and move on to new projects. If you have people who are apprehensive of automated agents performing tasks they were otherwise doing manually, you are housing the wrong people.

In case you feel stalled, shift gears. Know how to give your team a car when all they have asked for is a faster horse! Jumpstart with the help of experienced champions who will see you through this initial hump. People, after all, are your greatest assets and train them to do the right thing. CD improves velocity, productivity, and sustainability of software dev teams. Continuous delivery Principles Continuous integration vs delivery vs deployment.

Continuous integration vs. Sten Pittet. Continuous Delivery Principles. Continuous Delivery Pipeline What is Continuous Integration. Software testing for continuous delivery. What Is Continuous Deployment? Microservices and Microservices Architecture.

Continuous Delivery articles. How the practices relate to each other. What are the benefits of each practice? Practice What you need cost What you gain Continuous integration Your team will need to write automated tests for each new feature, improvement or bug fix.

You need a continuous integration server that can monitor the main repository and run the tests automatically for every new commits pushed.

Developers need to merge their changes as often as possible, at least once a day. Less bugs get shipped to production as regressions are captured early by the automated tests. Building the release is easy as all integration issues have been solved early. Less context switching as developers are alerted as soon as they break the build and can work on fixing it before they move to another task. Testing costs are reduced drastically — your CI server can run hundreds of tests in the matter of seconds.

Your QA team spend less time testing and can focus on significant improvements to the quality culture. Continuous delivery You need a strong foundation in continuous integration and your test suite needs to cover enough of your codebase.

By investing in build, test, deployment and environment automation, we substantially reduce the cost of making and delivering incremental changes to software by eliminating many of the fixed costs associated with the release process. Better products. Continuous delivery makes it economic to work in small batches.

This means we can get feedback from users throughout the delivery lifecycle based on working software. Happier teams. Peer-reviewed research has shown continuous delivery makes releases less painful and reduces team burnout. By removing the low-value painful activities associated with software delivery, we can focus on what we care about most—continuously delighting our users. Automation and processes allow them to spend less time working in the trenches. There can be some barriers to continuous delivery.

Initial installations, configurations, and workflow changes are required. So, for some organizations, CD requires:. Changing workflows requires time. This can disrupt business. Your business must establish a strategy. Make sure that new workflows and automated processes are part of your strategy. They should align with business objectives and meet operational requirements. For instance, you might be developing software using waterfall, spiral, or other methodologies. So, you must overcome learning curves before implementing continuous delivery.

This minimizes disruptions. And it ensures operations continue to run while staff get up to speed. You might also have resistant team members. So, what's the key to building the most efficient and effective CD processes? Engaging experts as you develop — and possibly implement — your strategy. Luckily, you can enlist the help of continuous delivery experts — and do continuous delivery the right way.

Contact us to learn more about continuous delivery services from Zend. Note: This post was originally published in and has been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness. What Are the Common Barriers? In this article, we give an overview of: Continuous delivery.

Continuous delivery benefits. Barriers to adoption. Advice for taking the next step. Let's start with the basics.