Continuous Delivery

This is the twelfth blog of a series of posts about the topics Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery. It explains how important continuous integration is, to deliver software in short iterations to the customer with a high quality standard.

After I wrote mainly posts about continuous integration, I also want to spend some words about continuous delivery.

With the success of agile development processes, the iterative creation of shippable software pieces is getting more and more important. It actually sounds great to delivery regularly new features to the customer in order to get instant feedback and to understand the solution better. It is usually pretty difficult for non-technical guys to understand complex systems based on hundreds of pages in a software specification. But these popular agile development processes come with other difficulties, like how to ensure the quality of the software in short development cycles and how to give the customer an easy possibility to accept and release features.

The previously posted concepts about continuous integration and gated check-ins are a very important basis for delivering high quality software, of course. But they do not address the issues during delivery.

In the next posts I would like to write about the following important topics to establish a working continuous delivery process:

• Automated Deployments
• Automated UI Testing
• Feature Roll-Out