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Continuous Delivery Tips and Tricks

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Read more about author Gilad David Maayan.

Continuous delivery is a software engineering practice in which software is built to be released to production at any time. It involves building, testing, and releasing software changes more frequently, so new code can be delivered to users more quickly. 

Continuous delivery is often achieved through the use of automation, which can handle tasks such as building, testing, and deploying code. By using continuous delivery, organizations can improve the speed at which they can deliver new features and updates to their users. It can also make it easier to identify and fix problems that arise.

Benefits of Continuous Delivery

Continuous delivery can provide several benefits for organizations that adopt it, including:

  • Improved software quality: By releasing code more frequently and in smaller increments, organizations can catch and fix problems earlier in the development process. This can help to improve the overall quality of the software and reduce the number of defects that make it into production.
  • Risk reduction: By releasing code more frequently, organizations can also reduce the risk associated with each release. Since fewer changes are made in each release, it is easier to identify and fix any problems that may arise. This can help to reduce the risk of major outages or other issues.
  • Employee satisfaction: Continuous delivery can also lead to increased employee satisfaction by allowing developers to see the results of their work more quickly and frequently. It can also reduce the amount of time that developers spend on tasks such as debugging and testing, allowing them to focus on more high-value activities.
  • Cost reduction: Finally, continuous delivery can help to reduce costs, both in the cloud and on-premises. Automating the build, test, and deployment process allows organizations to reduce the amount of time and resources spent on these activities, which can help to lower overall costs.

6 Tips and Tricks for Continuous Delivery Success

Establish SLOs

Establishing service-level objectives (SLOs) helps to ensure that the software being delivered meets the needs and expectations of users. SLOs are quantitative performance goals that are used to measure the quality of a service or product, including performance standards such as uptime, response time, and error rates. This can help to ensure that the software is reliable and effective for users and can also help to identify potential issues or areas for improvement.

In the context of continuous delivery, establishing SLOs can help to ensure that new code changes do not negatively impact the performance or reliability of the software. By continuously monitoring the performance of the software against established SLOs, organizations can identify any issues that may arise and take corrective action as needed. This can help to reduce the risk of outages or other problems and can also help to improve the overall quality of the software.

Ensure Reproducibility

A reproducible build is a software build that can be repeated in the same way every time, producing the same results. This means that the build process is deterministic and the output of the build (e.g., the compiled software) is always the same, given the same input (e.g., the source code).

Reproducibility is important because it helps to ensure that the software being delivered is consistent and reliable. If a build is not reproducible, it may produce different results each time it is run, which can lead to issues such as bugs or inconsistencies in the software. 

Reproducible builds are also useful for debugging and troubleshooting purposes. If a build is not reproducible, it may be difficult or impossible to determine the cause of an issue or problem. By creating reproducible builds, organizations can make it easier to identify and fix any issues that may arise.

Pay Attention to Application Dependencies

Modern software projects use code written by other developers, whether they are third-party vendors or open-source contributors. Dependencies could have quality issues, security vulnerabilities, or performance issues, and those issues will also affect the software project that uses them.

Application dependency mapping (ADM) is the process of identifying all the elements of a software project and understanding how they work together. Application dependency mapping is important to continuous delivery because it helps teams understand the relationships between different components of their software systems. This understanding is critical for several reasons:

  • It helps teams identify and prioritize which code changes will have the biggest impact on their systems.
  • It helps teams understand the potential knock-on effects of code changes, so they can plan and test accordingly.
  • It helps teams identify potential bottlenecks or points of failure in their systems, so they can address them before they cause problems.
  • It helps teams track and monitor the performance of their systems, so they can quickly detect and resolve any issues that arise.

Use Agile Development Practices

Agile software development is a set of principles and practices that emphasize collaboration, flexibility, and rapid iteration in the development process. By using mature agile practices, organizations can more effectively respond to changing requirements and deliver software that meets the needs of their users. For example, using a componentized software development architecture makes it easier to build and update applications. 

By using techniques such as continuous integration, automated testing, and frequent code review, organizations can improve the overall quality of the software and reduce the risk of defects. Additionally, with user stories and customer feedback loops, organizations can more effectively gather and incorporate user feedback into the development process, which can help to ensure that the software meets user expectations.

Get User Feedback

By gathering feedback from users, organizations can gain a better understanding of how the software is being used, what features are most important to users, and what problems or issues may need to be addressed. It can help organizations to more effectively prioritize and plan their development efforts. 

Customer feedback is also important for identifying and fixing problems or issues that may arise with the software. Although continuous delivery does not involve automating deployment to production, it is still possible to retrieve user feedback with a non-production build, such as in beta testing and canary releases.

Implement Continuous Monitoring

Observability refers to the ability to understand the state of a system and how it is behaving by examining data that it generates. This includes metrics, logs, and other types of data that can provide insight into the performance, reliability, and correctness of the system. A centralized observability platform is useful when collecting data from multiple sources across a distributed environment.

Continuous monitoring involves regularly collecting and analyzing this data to identify trends, anomalies, and other issues that may impact the system. It allows organizations to proactively identify and fix problems with their software, rather than waiting for users to report issues. Continuous monitoring is therefore an important part of any continuous delivery process, as it helps to ensure that the software being delivered is of high quality and performs as intended.

Conclusion

In conclusion, continuous delivery is a software engineering practice that can help organizations to deliver new code to users more quickly and with fewer issues. By adopting best practices such as establishing SLOs, ensuring reproducibility, implementing application dependency mapping, using mature agile development practices, getting user feedback, and establishing observability and continuous monitoring, organizations can improve the speed, quality, and reliability of their software releases. 

Continuous delivery can provide a number of benefits, including improved software quality, risk reduction, employee satisfaction, and cost reduction, making it an important consideration for any organization looking to improve its software development processes.