Get Better At Continuous Delivery, It’s Not That Hard!

Origins

There was once a manifesto done. A manifesto that has changed software development world. Agile manifesto. It was developed on a meeting of software developers on February 2001 and that is when the term Continues Delivery, or CD first appeared. That gave a start to many methodologies as SCRUM, extreme programming, DSDM, etc. You may consider reading David Farley’s and Jez Humble’s CD Bible as a great source of inspiration and information.

The part about advises

You are to remember the following things if your goal is in succeeding with Continuous delivery:

• Failure is not loss. Its experience. People are to be empowered (in Facebook for example new developers are shipping production code from day 1) and nobody may feel safe while they are being punished for every mistake they make. With such an approach your teams will eventually quit with all their initiative and no code will be delivered continuously. Mistakes should be treated as a process of learning rather than serious failures.
• Consider SOA or Service-Oriented Architecture. This approach is extremely great for development as everything is easily built, rebuilt, broken apart, examined, etc. Such an approach is easily scalable which means a great motivational bonus as well as empowered people will be getting credit for their personal achievements. And will be able of learning from mistakes, as noticed in the first bullet.
• Be fast. If there are any processes that are between you and innovating (meaning slowing things down), such processes are to be avoided at all cost.
• Don’t judge with emotions. Surely in such a fast-going process as CD a clear mind is more of a dream come true than average reality, but all the decisions are to be guided by facts, researches and proofs. Gather required metrics with data from what your end-users are desiring to see and what does the business side and stakeholders have in mind. Then develop according to that, rather your personal vision of how people want their product.

That noted, you are now through the majority of the well-spread and commonly committed mistakes relating CD.

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