Software Delivery Guide

I use the term “software delivery” to indicate the steps from a developer finishing work on a new feature, to that feature being used in production. In my younger days, the time for this would typically measured in months. One of the great advances in software development in the last two decades has been cutting this time, sometimes down to minutes. This means that features are used to generate value more quickly, both increasing the return on investment to build that feature, and providing fast feedback for future development.
There are many initiatives that have contributed to this change. The mindset of agile software development, has made the case for short cycle times and fast feedback. The Extreme Programming practice of Continuous Integration encourages all members of a development team to integrate their work daily, instead of developing features in isolation for days or weeks. The Devops movement encourages software developers, operations staff, and everyone else involved in delivery to work together - avoiding hand-offs that add delays and brittleness. Infrastructure-As-Code takes advantage of our cloud age ability to rapidly deploy and provision new servers. Pulling this all together is the practice of Continuous Delivery: which always keeps the software product in a releasable state, allowing fast release of features and rapid response to any failures.
A guide to material on martinfowler.com about software delivery and devops.
Continuous Integration is a software development practice where each member of a team merges their changes into a codebase together with their colleagues changes at least daily. Each of these integrations is verified by an automated build (including test) to detect integration errors as quickly as possible. Teams find that this approach reduces the risk of delivery delays, reduces the effort of integration, and enables practices that foster a healthy codebase for rapid enhancement with new features.
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Agile software development has broken down some of the silos between requirements analysis, testing and development. Deployment, operations and maintenance are other activities which have suffered a similar separation from the rest of the software development process. The DevOps movement is aimed at removing these silos and encouraging collaboration between development and operations.
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Continuous Delivery is a software development discipline where you build software in such a way that the software can be released to production at any time.
You’re doing continuous delivery when:
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Continuous Integration is a popular technique in software development. At conferences many developers talk about how they use it, and Continuous Integration tools are common in most development organizations. But we all know that any decent technique needs a certification program — and fortunately one does exist. Developed by one of the foremost experts in continuous delivery and devops, it’s known for being remarkably rapid to administer, yet very insightful for its results. Although it’s quite mature, it isn’t as well known as it should be, so as a fan of the technique I think it’s important for me to share this certification program with my readers. Are you ready to be certified for Continuous Integration? And how will you deal with the shocking truth that taking the test will reveal?
certification continuous delivery
One of the challenges of an automated build and test environment is you want your build to be fast, so that you can get fast feedback, but comprehensive tests take a long time to run. A deployment pipeline is a way to deal with this by breaking up your build into stages. Each stage provides increasing confidence, usually at the cost of extra time. Early stages can find most problems yielding faster feedback, while later stages provide slower and more through probing. Deployment pipelines are a central part of ContinuousDelivery.
continuous delivery build scripting
Traditionally, QA focuses on testing the software before release into production to see if it's ready for such release. But increasingly, modern QA organizations are also focusing attention onto the software running in production. By analyzing logs and other monitoring tools, they find quality problems to highlight to the development organization. This approach works particularly well with organizations that use continuous delivery to put new versions of the software into production rapidly and reliably.
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The definitive book on Continuous Delivery, which outlines the practices needed to bring code into production rapidly and safely. The key aspects are collaboration between everyone involved in the release process and automating as many aspects of that process as you can. The book goes through the foundations of configuration management, automated testing, and continuous integration - on which it shows how to build deployment pipelines to take integrated, tested code live. The book details the delivery ecosystem, managing infrastructure, environments and data.
by Jez Humble and David Farley
Continuous Delivery is now becoming a central practice for effective software delivery organizations. This talk explains the essentials of how it works, the role of a deployment pipeline, the difference between continuous delivery and continuous deployment, and some vital ingredients. It also covers the three main benefits of Continuous Delivery: reducing deployment risk, believable progress, and user feedback.
While Continuous Delivery is an essential practice for a effective software development organization, it takes time to learn. Teams need to learn new patterns to put into their code base that enable the automation and observability needs. While I haven't done a comprehensive list of such patters, I've collected several important ones on this s