Continuous Delivery

Abstract

In the previous chapters we’ve looked at development and testing practices and seen how the tools in Visual Studio help us to be more productive in each practice. In the chapters to come we will take our set of practices and implement a process where it all comes together to form one continuous flow. We will refer to this process as a continuous delivery process as it can be implemented to help us deliver features to our customers in an efficient and deterministic way. Many steps (perhaps all) in this process can and should be automated if we want to fulfill the ALM vision but automation is not important in itself. Instead, the work we do to improve the delivery process is what makes us successful. Analyzing how we release our software will give us insight into what steps in the process has dependencies to other steps, which steps are handled manually, which steps are error-prone, and so on. This knowledge is then used to help us focus on the most important parts first.