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Showing posts with label Business Value. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Business Value. Show all posts

Thursday, November 22, 2012

Where to start with Continuous Delivery

A lot of people have already started the journey without really knowing it. Its few companies today that don´t utilize some key parts of a Continuous process. When reading books and listening to speakers at conferences its easy to feel totally stone age. But the key is to remember that the journey is baby steps towards a vision. But Continuous Delivery is just progression of Continuous Integration and a lot of the basics are built upon in the progression.

By realizing we have something we can start to think about what we really need out of a Continuous Process. In some sense we all want to release all the time and we want our artifacts to be server images deployed on cloud nodes monitored by super cool graphs of all the metrics we can possibly think of. That is all nice but we all do need to provide a, hate the word, business value. So where is the business value in a continuous process for our organisation. That is the question we should ponder before we start.

In fact we had didnt have to ask our selfs the question in that way. Instead we where provided a challenge. For us it was key to solve system regression testing. Test automation and lowering cost in regression testing is obviously one of the key reasons to have Continuous Delivery. For us the key business case was to solve Continuous Regression testing. Continuous what ever else would come as a bonus.

Knowing that Continuous Regression Testing and not Continuous Deploy was our main priority made it easy for us to prioritize our efforts. Our efforts went largely into Testability Architecture in our application, Test Architecture in our test automation frameworks and automating a pipe that would deploy and test each code commit.

So really as with any agile development find your business value, focus on delivering it with a minimal effort "good enough" approach and iterate from there.

Over the next coming posts I will go though what we focused om in order to achieve Continuous System Regression Testing.