Continuous Delivery WhitePaper

Continuous Delivery in a Nut Shell

Whatever may be the type or size of the industry, transformation is the key to improvement. Continuous Delivery (aka CD) is emerging as the front runner in the race of transforming IT business from “Slow Delivery” to “Quick and Reliable Delivery”. In combination with right Agile methodology, CD is helping companies to reduce time from planning to production and hence allowing them to earn cash for their product/services faster and with better margins.

What’s in it for Me?
CD has something for everyone in different teams, product, companies or domains. For engineers in any domain (from textile to Software) it means to automate production plan and shipping finished product/services to customer faster and on regular intervals.

CD for Software Development.
From Software Development perspective, CD is divided in 5 components.

#1: Configuration Management. “Single Source Of Truth”
#2: CI and Build Management. “Early and Often”
#3: Testing. “Early, Repeatable and Ever Improving”
#4: IT and Infrastructure Management. “On-Demand and Scalable”
#5: Release Management. Ship Right Release at Right Time”

To set things right CD evolved with 8 basic principles.

Principle #1: The process for releasing/deploying software MUST be repeatable and reliable.
Principle #2: Automate everything possible!
Principle #3: If something is difficult or painful, do it more often.
Principle #4: Keep everything in source control.
Principle #5: Done means “released”.
Principle #6: Build quality in!
Principle #7: Everybody has responsibility for the release process.
Principle #8: Improve continuously.

Summary in a Nut Shell. 

* Special thanks to  David Farley & Jez Humble (as some text of this post is sourced from their book "Continuous Delivery")