Four Principles of Low-Risk Software Releases

Published 16 February 2012

One key goal of continuous deployment is to reduce the risk of releasing software. Counter-intuitively, increased throughput and increased production stability are not a zero-sum game, and effective continuous deployment actually reduces the risk of any individual release. In the course of teaching continuous delivery and talking to people who implement it, I've come to see that "doing it right" can be reduced to four principles:

  • Low-risk releases are incremental.
  • Decouple deployment and release.
  • Focus on reducing batch size.
  • Optimize for resilience.

Read the rest of this article on InformIT (free, no registration required)