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 are delivering product more frequently. Because the steps are run multiple times a Sprint, teams need to automate all of the steps along the way 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 are 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.
Along with the feedback benefits, Continuous Delivery also reduces risk since each deployment is smaller and therefore, if there is a problem, it can be rolled back and found more easily.
Resource Links:
- Benefits of Continuous Testing
- Continuous Delivery and the Perils of Feature Branching
- Continuous Delivery Coding Patterns: Latent-to-Live Code & Forward Compatible Interim Versions
- Continuous Delivery: The Value Proposition – Jez Humble
- Continuous Deployment at Instagram
- Continuous deployment for mission-critical applications – Eric Ries
- Continuous deployment in 5 easy steps by Eric Ries
- How Netflix Deploys Code
- What are the technical practices of a Lean Startup?
EXAMPLE FROM REAL WORLD
- Etsy’s Story of Continuous Delivery and Deployment
- Feature Flags at Flickr
- Quantum of Deployment
- Quora – deploys up to 50+ times a day
- The Software Revolution Behind LinkedIn’s Gushing Profits
- Wealthfront deploys up to 50 times a day
CONTINUOUS DELIVERY AND DEPLOYMENT BOOKS
- Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation – Jez Humble, David Farley
See Also:
Agile Engineering Practices
Continuous Integration
DevOps
Mark Levison has been helping Scrum teams and organizations with Agile, Scrum and Kanban style approaches since 2001. From certified scrum master training to custom Agile courses, he has helped well over 8,000 individuals, earning him respect and top rated reviews as one of the pioneers within the industry, as well as a raft of certifications from the ScrumAlliance. Mark has been a speaker at various Agile Conferences for more than 20 years, and is a published Scrum author with eBooks as well as articles on InfoQ.com, ScrumAlliance.org an AgileAlliance.org.
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