The most recent reports about Continuous Delivery (CD) show a higher adoption rate year over year among enterprises. The authors of the Continuous Delivery methodology defined three key traits to determine when an organization has fully implemented its practices. The following questions represent them:
1. Is your software confirmed to be in a shippable state every time a new feature or patch is added?
2. Does your team perform on-demand push-button deployments of any desired version of your software to any environment?
3. Do all of the stakeholders have immediate visibility into the production readiness of your systems?
Continuous Delivery can be seen as a natural evolution from continuous integration and agile software development practices. While these changes are a huge challenge, there are many practical steps you can take to make real progress today:
1. Put Development, QA and Operations in the same boat, by establishing common goals. Encourage good communication, collaboration and openness between teams.
2. Get your builds running. Before starting deploying, first you need to build the code. Make sure you have Continuous Integration (CI) process on place before moving forward.
3. Automate and version everything – from environments provisioning through build process to builds deployment and testing/verification.
4. Share tools and procedures between teams.