In our book, Dave and I focussed mainly on the principles and technical practices of continuous delivery and its ecosystem: things like automated testing, managing configuration, environments, and data, and implementing a deployment pipeline. One of the things we didn’t spend much time on was the business context and value proposition of continuous delivery. In a way that’s just as well, because the book is already long enough.
However this context is important – and not just because it helps you convince your boss to implement continuous delivery. One of the big technical memes of the last year has been continuous deployment – the practice of releasing every good version of your software, often multiple times a day. But that practice came out of a business imperative, which finds its general expression in the lean startup movement. In startups, it’s essential to get a minimum viable product available to users and then iterate rapidly based on real feedback. Sometimes you need to change direction in a more radical way (known as pivoting) if you discover what you built isn’t valuable.
When building strategic (as opposed to utility) software in a non-startup environment, many of the same imperatives apply. Furthermore, continuous delivery has other important benefits: for example, it reduces the risk of each individual release substantially, and provides a true measure of project progress.
I’ve found myself talking a lot about the value proposition of continuous delivery since I wrote the book, so I thought it would be useful to write it all down. You can get hold of my essay here on InformIT for free. InformIT have also made chapter 5 of my book – which explains the deployment pipeline in some detail – available free of charge too.
[...] Jez Humble’s blog [...]
[...] We bow to the philosophy of keeping our software simple (the code and the experience) and doing the minimum amount of work required to put the software in the hands of our users so we can inspect-and-adapt, or in the words of The Lean Startup the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop (if you are thinking in this direction then I also encourage you to immerse yourself in continuous delivery). [...]