Continuous delivery
01 — Challenge
In today’s market, fast time-to-market is everything. Waiting, or bottlenecks in either processes or resources and laborious manual tasks, are everyday issues we all can relate to. Response times for customer requests costs money and are not beneficial for customer experience.
02 — Solution
Continuous Delivery (CD) is a foundation for any modern software development processes. Shorter development cycles and smaller entities for deployments which pass through standardized test processes enable faster time-to-market releases. Having faster time-to-market cycles creates competitive advantage and builds a better customer experience.
Continuous delivery makes it possible for the product development process to enable automation on a whole new level. Instead of just automating unit tests, automation can be enabled on UI testing, load testing, integration testing, API reliability testing, etc and all this automation can be built as part of the continuous delivery process.
Continuous integration (CI) is one of the foundations in an agile software development process. In more details, it is DevOps practice where developed code changes are integrated as early and as often as possible.
CI brings the quality gates to more early stages of the development process and puts more emphasis on having a good test suite. This reduces significantly the time spent on just fixing bugs and regression. CI also enables a continuous feedback mechanism for the development teams to follow the quality of their work and allow the teams to adapt their development process based on this feedback.
Biggest business benefit of adopting CI is that it will save you time during your development cycle by identifying and addressing conflicts early and thus helps you meet business requirements and improve code quality.
To get the full benefits of CI, you should also make sure you have a functioning test automation framework in place and your test automation coverage is up to a level where you are able to run them for every change.
Continuous Delivery enables you to react faster to customer requirements. Naturally, without quality speed is useless, but having both creates a concrete competitive advantage.
In addition, having a fully functioning continuous delivery process increases productivity significantly.
03 — In practise
When automating manual and error prone tasks and reducing repetitive tasks one leaves more time for innovation, creativity and customer value creation. All this increases productivity and increased productivity translates to happiness. And we all know happy teams are more engaged both to your business and customers.
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