It’s hard to look at a tech blog these days without seeing something about “continuous” this and “continuous” that. Market pressures and consumer demand are prompting businesses to adopt Continuous Delivery (CD), a design practice used in software development to automate and improve the process of software delivery. Right now, adoption rates for CD are soaring, and CD is rapidly becoming the new normal. In this piece, we’ll take a look at why.

What is Continuous Delivery?

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CD is a software development discipline where early feedback, automated builds and tests, and incremental deployments can dramatically speed up product and application release cycles. Many businesses are embracing this as a competitive advantage that allows them to accelerate time-to-market without sacrificing quality.

It produces a pipeline with the capability to rapidly, reliably and repeatedly push out enhancements and fixes to customers, so firms can respond or adapt to business needs faster and improve satisfaction for business stakeholders and end-users alike.

Continuous Delivery enables businesses to provide better products more quickly – allowing software to be released into production at any time and resulting in product that more closely matches what the customer ultimately wants.

Because CD makes software releasable at any time, a business can drive decisions about when to release a product, rather than letting IT make that choice. This has huge advantages. For example, if you’re a gaming company, your executive  team may decide it’s better to release a product with a few features missing before a holiday rush to capture a rising wave of demand, instead of waiting for the product to be 100 percent complete and potentially missing out on a huge purchasing season.

Continuous Delivery as the “New Normal”

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You may think CD, which leverages the extreme end of Agile software development techniques, is new. However, some of the most innovative companies in the world have been practicing it successfully for years – the New York Stock Exchange, which used Perforce to deploy the world’s first global equities exchange is a great example.

Continuous Delivery was pioneered by SaaS firms that needed to push multiple production releases out every day to be competitive, such as Salesforce.com, Edmunds.com, Netflix and Pandora. According to a recent study of more than 600 software developers, more than 80 percent of SaaS companies report adoption of Continuous Delivery on at least some projects, with 47 percent using it across all projects.

Meanwhile, non-SaaS companies have evolved to practice CD as well, with 65 percent of all respondents saying their companies have migrated at least one project or team to Continuous Delivery practices. Approximately 28 percent said their organization is practicing CD techniques on all projects, and 46 percent say their competitors have also adopted Continuous Delivery. Only 3 percent say they have no plans to adopt CD.

Keys to Continuous Delivery Success

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Whether you’re already using CD and seeking to further leverage its benefits or jumping in for the first time, there are some things you should keep in mind to be successful.

Here are five best practices that distinguish companies who are doing CD well:

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1. Think Beyond the Code – Your delivery pipeline should treat all assets, including non-software ones, as first-class components. This includes artwork and other elements. If these additional artifacts are not tracked along with the rest of the application, you might suffer the consequences of releasing a poor quality product.

2. Automate, Automate, Automate – In a highly automated environment, changes can immediately be integrated, and failures can quickly be returned to the development team for correcting. Automation eliminates manual and ad-hoc processes, and enables predictability and repeatability.

3. Make Everything Fully Visible – Improved visibility leads to increased quality. Having a complete catalogue of changes across teams and projects enables you to better predict and measure the potential impact of future updates. Sharing a common view of assets reduces errors and ensures that any conflicts are discovered early – rather than discovering problems right before shipping.

4. Track Every Change – Just as the best forensic labs have a “chain of custody,” traceability reinforces best practices in development and deployment. Recording every change, event and transaction is hugely valuable in situations where a rollback to a previous version may be required. Top companies apply this chain-of-custody approach to all aspects of software application management.

5. Put It All in One Place – At Perforce, we call this having a “single source of truth” across the enterprise. Doing so can yield immeasurable results because it sets up a unified repository for all of your assets. This supports virtually unlimited scaling. If assets and artifacts are distributed across multiple locations and multiple stores, you run the risk of introducing errors and failing to meet delivery deadlines. Unifying the collection and management of assets reduces complexity and supports a dynamic, innovative environment.

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The foundation of any Continuous Delivery approach is proactive collaboration using a unified version control platform. This provides many benefits, not the least of which are streamlining siloes, allowing teams to work in tighter loops and enabling the rollback of incremental changes.

In the study I mentioned, 96 percent of respondents view their collaboration platform as important to Continuous Delivery.

The market pressures your organization faces today are enormous. Customers are less patient and less forgiving than ever. On a moment’s notice, you need to rapidly and efficiently make changes based on the latest customer demand or consumer whim.  And you’re expected to do it without sacrificing quality.

In the race to stay ahead, move ever faster, not slower. By leveraging sound Continuous Delivery practices, you’ll be able to beat the pace of your competitors and meet the rising expectations of your customers. Building competencies and processes around Continuous Delivery will no doubt help your organization transition more quickly to the new normal for software development.

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 About the Author

Christopher Seiwald is founder and CEO of Perforce Software, a privately held company with headquarters in Alameda, Calif., and international offices in the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada. www.perforce.com.

feature image : Mukumbura via photopin cc