Continuous delivery is probably the most effective approach to software development that we know. It does not seem to matter what kind of software you are producing, when you apply continuous delivery, you get better results. Continuous delivery is the approach to software development practiced by most of the best companies in software development in the world. Continuous delivery is the best way that we know to create better software faster, so what is the impact of that on the organizations that practice it. In this article, I will discuss the important benefits of using continuous delivery as a practice in your organization.
Better Software Faster
Continuous delivery helps in releasing software updates faster because with automated processes in place, the moment code change is available, it automatically validates the code and deploys it to the production. It also helps in detecting failures as soon as they occur, so that the development team can fix the issue as soon as possible. CI/CD pipelines are used extensively to merge new code and deploy them on the production environment after they have been tested thoroughly.
Improves Productivity
Obviously, the automated processes eliminate lots of time waste between each and every software development stage and it improves the developer’s productivity. It also enables developers to find and fix bugs quicker because once it is deployed to dev, staging environments, it is tested by the testing team and if there are any issues with the code, there is a ticket sent back to the development team to rework on the code and fix the issue quickly.
Streamlining the Workflows
By using continuous delivery in your software development life cycle, organizations can streamline the workflows because CICD pipelines make sure that the automate workflows always get executed in the same way. So, you can define the tasks requirements and the CICD pipeline will execute all the tasks defined by you, everytime it executes the workflow. This will help in increasing the efficiency of the product and the ROI. These workflows are automated, and they make sure all the tasks execute properly. In addition, these workflows are very customizable as per the organisation’s requirements.
All the big organizations use continuous delivery and automate workflows to speed up the processes, which helps them gain higher ROI in terms of efficiency and revenue.
For example, consider that on average:
- Netflix deploys 100 times per day.
- Amazon deploys every 11.6 seconds.
- Facebook deploys least twice a day.
More Skilled and Happier Development Teams
Continuous delivery leads to a happier and more productive team environment which is great for recruitment and retention. The questions to answer here are:
- Does your business attract innovators?
- Does it attract the development teams that you want?
- Can your business react quickly to changes as they approach you from a commercial point of view or a technical point of view?
- Is your staff engaged and enthused in the practice of software development?
- Is it an exciting place to work for these creative people?
Microsoft adopted continuous delivery, and they did some analysis of the behaviours of the team. I will quote from what Microsoft said: “Before implementing the technical practices and discipline of
Better Customer Focus
With continuous delivery, the gap between the customers and the software delivery organization can be continuously reduced. This is important because reducing the gaps is part of the way in which we can work more effectively. The traditional way of reducing the gaps is to increase bureaucracy and to be more strict about rules. The most effective way of reducing these gaps is to shorten the whole cycle by making things making these gaps smaller and reducing their impact, which is precisely what continuous delivery does.
Continuous delivery enables businesses to become more experimental. It allows enterprises to try commercial and product ideas in the field quickly and efficiently. This is the real difference between monstrously huge companies like amazon or google and more traditional companies. Those companies move quickly and experiment with ideas and learn fast, this is really about economies of speed. If we can move quickly with confidence, we are able to learn more effectively, and that way, we can hone our commercial impact and our product offerings better to meet the needs of our customers and clients.
Reduces Risk and Increases compliance
The continuous delivery efforts and the agile and DevOps transformation lead to fundamental discussions about the organization and governance of software development and improved understanding and alignment between business and IT. Continuous delivery works pretty much everywhere, at least in my experience, it doesn’t matter the technology, the regulatory regime, the hardware dependencies very often, whatever the nature of the technology or the focus of the business that is employing it, continuous delivery is a benefit. Continuous delivery provides us better control and a lower risk way of working and allows us to monitor that and report on it and trace it. It reduces the risk by isolating the faults identified in the product, so that the negative impact is minimum. CICD pipelines with proper monitoring systems ensures to monitor the product well to identify the issue immediately when they occur and its location, to remediate the bugs as soon as possible.
Make more money
The last in my list of advantages that continuous delivery brings to the businesses is that these organizations make more money than organizations that don’t. It helps organizations in optimizing their resource management, allocating human capital in a better way, and releasing their products faster with fewer errors. This helps organizations in making more money in the market.
The market size of continuous delivery in 2018 was 1.62 billion U.S. dollars and it is projected to be 6.03 billion U.S. dollar by year 2026, growing at a CAGR of 17.76% from 2019 to 2026.
Final Thoughts
That was all about some important benefits of applying continuous delivery. Continuous delivery allows us to make better quality software more quickly, fulfill regulatory demands more effectively, and have happier staff who are more inventive and more creative in their work. As a result, those staffs have less burnout and seem to stay longer with the organizations that practice continuous delivery. Continuous delivery practitioners deliver more reliably on business goals. As a result, these organizations make more money than traditional organizations.
I believe that continuous delivery will impact any business. Either your business will adopt continuous delivery, and you will be learning these more effective, more efficient ways of producing software, or it won’t. At some point, one of your competitors will adopt these practices. When they do, they will beat you in the market because this is a more effective way of being digitally disruptive and creating better quality software faster.
