Starting CD

Overview

Continuous Delivery extends beyond automation. It encompasses the entire cycle of identifying value, delivering it, and verifying with the end-user that the expected value was delivered.

Goals

CD aims to:

• Uncover external dependencies and organizational process issues
• Reduce overhead
• Improve quality feedback
• Enhance end-user outcomes and team work/life balance

CD Maturity

While avoiding rigid “maturity models,” we can outline competency levels:

Minimums

• Daily integration of tested changes to the trunk
• Consistent delivery process for all changes
• No manual quality gates
• Same artifact used in all environments

Good

• New work delivered in less than 2 days
• All changes delivered from the trunk
• Commit-to-production time under 60 minutes
• Less than 5% of changes require remediation
• Service restoration time under 60 minutes

Continuous Integration (CI)

Desired Outcomes

• More frequent integration of smaller, higher quality changes
• Efficient test architecture
• Lean code review process
• Reduced Work In Progress (WIP)

Continuous Delivery/Deploy

Aims to achieve:

• Increased delivery frequency and stability
• Improved deploy success and time to restore service
• Reduced development cycle time and process waste
• Smaller, less risky production releases
• High-performing product teams with domain expertise

Getting Started

New to Continuous Delivery? Start here:

Understanding CD Practices

CD Dependencies - Visual guide showing how practices like TDD, BDD, and Trunk-Based Development build upon each other to enable CD. See practices.minimumcd.org for detailed implementation guides.

Recommended Practices

1. Conduct a Value Stream Map
2. Build a roadmap to remove constraints
3. Align with the CI working agreement
4. Implement a single CD automated pipeline per repository

Pipeline Best Practices

• Focus on hardening the pipeline to block bad changes
• Integrate outside the pipeline, virtualize inside
• Limit stage gates (ideally one or fewer)
• Developers own the full pipeline

Key Metrics

• CI cycle time: < 10 minutes from commit to artifact creation
• CD cycle time: < 60 minutes from commit to Production

Tips

• Use trunk merge frequency, development cycle time, and delivery frequency to uncover pain points
• Keep all metrics visible and refer to them often
• See CD best practices and CD Roadblocks for more tips

Further Reading

• Continuous Delivery
• Jez Humble: Continuous Delivery sounds great, but it won’t work here @ DevOn Summit 2017