Continuous Delivery in Software Development
Published: 2023-03-28 13:01:57

_Continuous Delivery (CD) is the next step in the evolution of the software development process. It draws on Agile methodologies but surpasses it. CD is changing the way software is delivered and opening up a whole range of benefits, ranging from greater adaptability to more reliable products to improved customer experiences._
 
But what if software continuous delivery means sacrificing quality for speed? Does it really lead to both higher responsiveness and higher reliability? Let’s find out if it really enables you to get better products to your customers more often.

## WHAT IS SOFTWARE CONTINUOUS DELIVERY?
This is a methodology that focuses on smaller releases more often to avoid the issues and bugs that come with large, slow releases. This approach can actually make your development more agile and more able to react to changes. It comes with quicker reaction times, less risk and more flexible release options. Continuous software delivery also identifies inefficiencies and hidden costs.
Considering the rapid pace of technological innovation, and consumers’ rising expectations for quality products, it makes sense to evaluate and modernize processes to keep pace with these developments.

## BENEFITS OF CONTINUOUS DELIVERY
The practices at the heart of continuous delivery software help us achieve several important benefits:
### Lower costs
Any successful product or service will evolve significantly over the course of its lifetime. By investing in build, test, deployment and environment automation, we substantially reduce the cost of making and delivering incremental changes by eliminating many of the fixed costs associated with the release process.
### Low-risk releases
The primary goal of continuous delivery software is to make deployments painless, low-risk events that can be performed at any time on demand. By applying patterns such as blue-green deployments it is relatively straightforward to achieve zero-downtime deployments that are undetectable to users.
### Faster time to market
It’s not uncommon for the integration and test/fix phase of the traditional phased lifecycle to consume weeks or even months. When teams work together to automate the build and deployment, environment provisioning, and regression testing processes, [developers](https://existek.com/dedicated-software-development-team/) can incorporate integration and regression testing into their daily work and completely remove these phases. We also avoid the large amounts of re-work that plague the phased approach.
### Happier team
Peer-reviewed research has shown continuous software development makes releases less painful and reduces team burnout. Furthermore, when we release more frequently, teams can engage more actively with users, learn which ideas work and which don’t and see first-hand the outcomes of the work they have done. By removing the low-value painful activities, we can focus on what we care about most—continuously delighting our users.
### Better products
Continuous software development makes it economic to work in small batches. This means we can get feedback from users throughout the lifecycle based on working results. Techniques such as A/B testing enable us to take a hypothesis-driven approach to [product development](https://existek.com/custom-software-development-company/) whereby we can test ideas with users before building out whole features. This means we can avoid the 2/3 of features we build that deliver zero or negative value to our businesses.
### Higher quality
When developers have automated tools that discover regressions within minutes, teams are free to focus their effort on user research and higher-level testing activities such as exploratory testing, usability testing, and performance and security testing. By building a deployment pipeline, these activities can be performed continuously throughout [the development process](https://existek.com/how-we-work/), ensuring quality is built into products and services from the beginning.

## HOW TO IMPLEMENT CONTINUOUS SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT
It goes without saying, but the basics are important when you are first setting up a transition to CD.

1. You need to evaluate what it will take, as well as review overall strategies and stakeholders’ goals.
2. Next, draw up a schedule of builds and maintenance release cycles; review builds’ dependency management; and identify any gaps in technologies, tools, and processes.
3. The next major phase involves CI and further defining the process. Develop a CI workflow and document the design flow. It should contain branching strategies, merging strategies, dependencies and multi-site coordination.
4. Choose CI technologies and tools.
5. Determine and document the timing for automation; with test automation, release cycles are shortened.

You’re almost there! Now it’s on to the deployment. Key steps include: breaking down the CI workflow into steps, automating the product builds, using a CI framework or building an automation tool to develop the packaging deployment scripts, and consistent reporting and tracking so as to facilitate troubleshooting.

## CONCLUSION
This is the Continuous Delivery in a nutshell. In this article, we’ve covered many pros and cons of this approach and briefly described the benefits it can bring to your overall software delivery process.

The full article about [Continuous Delivery in Software Development](https://existek.com/blog/continuous-delivery-software-development/) is published here.