Continuous Delivery

Continuous Integration is best described in a landmark article by our Chief Scientist, Martin Fowler. Originally one of the fundamental practices outlined in the Extreme Programming (XP) methodology, Continuous Integration (CI) has become an essential ingredient for teams doing iterative and incremental software delivery.

The term Continuous Deployment was coined around the same time to describe how similar automation techniques could be applied to the actual release of software from one environment into another. Essentially, organizations who practice Continuous Deployment are said to be always 'ready to release'.

Continuous Delivery (CD) is a concept that was first described in the 2010 book authored by ThoughtWorker, Jez Humble. CD provides a pattern language for the collection of software build, test and deployment activities that happen on the path to production. Further, CD references CI as a starting point, and extends it using lean philosophy and planning techniques that make it relevant to the greater business community. The goal of CD is to put customers in control of an ongoing cycle of software releases.

CI made its way to many delivery teams by way of open source software called CruiseControl, that was developed by ThoughtWorks in the year 2000. Since then it has spawned a wide market of development tools in the mainstream market. After many years of working with customers to construct deployment pipelines, ThoughtWorks developed Go as the first tool designed specifically for the practice of continuous delivery.

“Business knows all too well that slower and larger releases are buggy and unreliable. With Go we have frequent releases of smaller amounts of functionality. This avoids all the pressure, escalations, and rollbacks, while enabling reliable, predictable releases. They really see a value in this.”