Continuous Delivery and Deployment

Continuous Delivery is the game of delivering features to Production whenever a change is made. It shortens the feedback and even the payment cycle, because you deliver the product more frequently. Because the steps are run multiple times a Sprint, teams need to automate all of the steps to deployment.

The application is built, and its automated test suite is run. In many organizations, it may be promoted through a staging environment where a wider suite of integration tests is performed.

In some organizations, a human (or the Product Owner 😉) decides with each build if enough additional value has been created to be worth deploying. This approach tends to be a sub-optimization.

Continuous Delivery builds on its sibling of Continuous Integration. With Continuous Integration, the team integrates their work more frequently.

Principles

• Build quality in
• Work in small batches
• Computers perform repetitive tasks, people solve problems
• Relentlessly pursue continuous improvement
• Everyone is responsible

Along with the benefits of feedback, continuous delivery also reduces risk since each deployment is smaller. Therefore, if there is a problem, it can be rolled back and found more easily. Some of the other business benefits: Faster time to market; Able to test product ideas sooner and reduced cost of fixing defects.