If you’re in charge of software development at your company, you’re no stranger to the constant pressure to deliver new features and updates. But as any software developer knows, the release process can be time-consuming and error-prone, especially when it comes to manually testing and deploying code. This is where continuous delivery comes in.
What is Continuous Delivery?
Continuous delivery is a software engineering practice in which code changes are automatically built, tested, and deployed to production. This means that code changes can be pushed to production multiple times a day, rather than waiting for a scheduled release. By automating the testing and deployment process, continuous delivery helps to reduce the risk of human error and makes it easier to get code changes into the hands of users quickly.
Benefits of Continuous Delivery
There are many benefits to using continuous delivery in your software development process. Here are just a few:
- Faster Time to Market: With continuous delivery, code changes can be pushed to production quickly, allowing you to get new features and updates to your users faster. This can be especially important in fast-moving industries where the competition is always looking for ways to outdo you.
- Increased Efficiency: Automating the testing and deployment process means that your team can spend less time on manual tasks and more time on development. This can lead to increased efficiency and productivity.
- Improved Quality: Continuous delivery allows you to catch and fix issues early on in the development process, rather than waiting until the code has been deployed to production. This can help to improve the overall quality of your software.
- Enhanced Collaboration: Continuous delivery encourages collaboration between developers, testers, and operations teams. By working together and automating the deployment process, teams can ensure that code changes are deployed smoothly and efficiently.
Implementing Continuous Delivery
If you’re interested in implementing continuous delivery at your company, there are a few key steps you’ll need to follow.
- Set Up a Continuous Integration Server: The first step in implementing continuous delivery is setting up a continuous integration (CI) server. This is a tool that automatically builds and tests code changes whenever they are pushed to the code repository.
- Automate Your Tests: In order for continuous delivery to be effective, you’ll need to automate as many of your tests as possible. This includes both unit tests and integration tests.
- Use Feature Flags: Feature flags allow you to deploy code changes to production without immediately making them available to users. This can be useful for testing new features or rolling out changes gradually.
- Monitor Your Deployments: It’s important to monitor your deployments closely to ensure that everything is running smoothly. This includes setting up alerts for when deployments fail and keeping an eye on key performance indicators (KPIs) such as error rates and response times.
Conclusion
Continuous delivery is a powerful software engineering practice that can help you deliver new features and updates to your users faster and with fewer errors. By automating the testing and deployment process, you can improve efficiency, enhance collaboration, and improve the overall quality of your software.
However, more automation often means more complexity. In addition, the maintenance of test scripts can become a time-consuming task, which is often neglected because there is no time. This can in itself become a delaying factor in the continious delivery process. Orangebeard solves this issue by prioritizing which tests should be run first, but also by automatic defect analysis which also identifies the cause of repetitive failing tests. With Orangebeard you will continue to generate the acceleration of your software delivery!
