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 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.