Continuous Delivery: Who Should Be Involved

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Continuous delivery means the capability to promptly, securely, and consistently deploy various types of changes to software whenever necessary. Teams adept in continuous delivery possess the capacity to introduce software updates and modifications to production with minimal risk, even during standard business hours, all without adversely affecting end-users.

Continuous Delivery Principles

There are five principles at the heart of continuous delivery:

Build quality in
Work in small batches
Computers perform repetitive tasks, people solve problems
Relentlessly pursue continuous improvement
Everyone is responsible

It’s easy to get bogged down in the details of implementing continuous delivery—tools, architecture, practices, politics—if you find yourself lost, try revisiting these principles and you may find it helps you refocus on what’s important.

Continuous delivery rests on three foundations: continuous integration, comprehensive configuration management, and continuous testing.

So, what are the processes involved? who should contribute to continuous delivery? What are their responsibilities? We’ll see it in this blog post.

The Core CD Team

At the heart of a successful Continuous Delivery process is a core team dedicated to making it happen. This team typically comprises:

DevOps Engineers

DevOps engineers are the architects of your CD pipeline. They specialize in automating and streamlining the software delivery process. Their responsibilities include:

Building and maintaining deployment pipelines.
Managing infrastructure as code (IaC).
Ensuring smooth and rapid code deployments.

For instance, at Company X, a team of DevOps engineers uses tools like Jenkins and Docker to automate deployments, enabling developers to focus on coding without worrying about the intricacies of deployment.

Release Managers

Release managers play a pivotal role in coordinating and overseeing the release process. Their duties include:

Ensuring that releases align with the organization’s goals and schedules.
Coordinating activities between development and operations teams.
Managing rollback plans in case of issues during deployment.
Release managers are essential in maintaining a balance between speed and stability during CD.

QA team

QA team are the gatekeepers of software quality. Their contributions to CD include:

Creating and maintaining automated test suites.
Executing tests at various stages of the CD pipeline.
Identifying and reporting defects early in the development process.

Developers and Their Role

Developers are the backbone of any software project. In a CD environment, their roles extend beyond writing code:

Developer-Centric CD

Developers actively participate in the deployment and operational aspects of their code. This shift toward a DevOps culture empowers developers to:

Write code that’s easily deployable and maintainable.
Take ownership of their code in production.
Collaborate closely with operations teams.

GitHub is a shining example of developer involvement in CD. Developers use GitHub Actions to automate workflows, seamlessly integrating their code changes into the CD pipeline.

Stakeholders and Product Owners

The involvement of stakeholders, including product owners and business teams, is often underestimated in CD:

Beyond Development

Stakeholders bring a unique perspective to the CD process. Their roles encompass:

Defining project requirements and priorities.
Ensuring that CD aligns with business goals.
Providing crucial feedback to shape the product.

At Startup Z, the product owner actively participates in the CD process, using tools like JIRA to prioritize user stories and provide feedback, ultimately ensuring that the CD pipeline delivers value to customers.

The Importance of Continuous Testing

Continuous testing is the bedrock of CD:

The Testing Backbone

QA engineers create and maintain automated test suites that:

Run at various stages of the CD pipeline.
Ensure code changes meet quality standards.
Detect defects early in the development process.

Google is a prime example of an organization that heavily relies on continuous testing to maintain the quality and reliability of its products throughout the CD pipeline.

The following diagram shows the types of automated and manual tests to run

The following diagram shows an example of a simple linear deployment pipeline. In this example, green means no problems were found, and red means that one or more problems were discovered.

Continuous Feedback and Monitoring

Continuous feedback loops are the lifeblood of CD:

Feedback loops enable teams to:

Gather insights from production environments.
Learn from customer behavior and performance metrics.
Make data-driven decisions to improve CD processes.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides a suite of monitoring and observability tools, such as Amazon CloudWatch, that help teams collect real-time data and make informed decisions.

Security and Compliance

Security is non-negotiable in CD:

Security as a Priority

Integrating security into the CD pipeline is crucial for:

Identifying and mitigating vulnerabilities early.
Ensuring compliance with industry regulations and best practices.

Netflix, known for its robust CD practices, incorporates security checks into its pipeline using tools like Netflix Security Monkey.

To sum up the above, DORA research found that the following technical capabilities drive the ability to achieve continuous delivery. Transformational leadership within the organization also drives the implementation of many of these technical capabilities.

To help your team get higher throughput and lower risk releases, implement the following continuous delivery practices:

Continuous delivery practices

Test automation: The use of comprehensive automated test suites primarily created and maintained by developers. Effective test suites are reliable—that is, tests find real failures and only pass releasable code.

Deployment automation: The degree to which deployments are fully automated and do not require manual intervention.

Trunk-based development: Characterized by fewer than three active branches in a code repository; branches and forks having very short lifetimes (e.g., less than a day) before being merged into mainline; and application teams rarely or never having code lock periods when no one can check in code or do pull requests due to merging conflicts, code freezes, or stabilization phases.

Shift left on security: Integrating security into the design and testing phases of the software development process. This process includes conducting security reviews of applications, including the information security team in the design and demonstration process for applications, using pre-approved security libraries and packages, and testing security features as a part of the automated test suite.

A loosely coupled architecture: Architecture that lets teams test and deploy their applications on demand, without requiring orchestration with other services. Having a loosely coupled architecture allows your teams to work independently without relying on other teams for support and services, which in turn enables them to work quickly and deliver value to the organization.

Empowering teams to choose tools: Teams that can choose which tools to use do better at continuous delivery. No one knows better than practitioners what they need to be effective.

Continuous integration (CI): A development practice where code is regularly checked in, and each check-in triggers a set of quick tests to discover regressions, which developers fix immediately. The CI process creates canonical builds and packages that are ultimately deployed and released.

Continuous testing: Testing throughout the software delivery lifecycle rather than as a separate phase after dev complete. With continuous testing, developers and testers work side by side. High performers practice test-driven development, get feedback from tests in less than ten minutes, and continuously review and improve their test suites (for example, to better find defects and keep complexity under control).

Version control: The use of a version control system, such as Git or Subversion, for all production artifacts, including application code, application configurations, system configurations, and scripts for automating build and configuration of environments.

Test data management: Effective practices include having adequate data to run your test suite, the ability to acquire necessary data on demand, and the data not limiting the number of tests you can run. We caution that your teams should minimize, whenever possible, the amount of test data needed to run automated tests.

Comprehensive monitoring and observability: Allows teams to understand the health of their systems. Effective solutions enable teams to monitor predefined metrics, including system state as experienced by users, as well as allowing engineers to interactively debug systems and explore properties and patterns as they emerge.

Proactive notifications: Monitoring system health so that teams can pre-emptively detect and mitigate problems.

Database change management: Database changes don’t slow teams down if they follow a few key practices, including storing database changes as scripts in version control (and managing these changes the same way as production application changes), making database changes visible to everyone in the software delivery lifecycle (including engineers), and communicating with all parties when changes to the application require database changes.

Code maintainability: Systems and tools that make it easy for developers to change code maintained by others, to find examples in the codebase, to reuse other people’s code, and to add, upgrade, and migrate to new versions of dependencies without breaking their code.

“The above is a quoted section from an article on DevOps tech” (Google cloud, “DevOps tech: Continuous delivery”, https://cloud.google.com/architecture/devops/devops-tech-continuous-delivery)

Challenges and Considerations

While implementing CD, organizations must address common challenges:

Cultural Transformation

Cultural considerations are paramount:

Embrace change and a culture of continuous improvement.
Learn from failures and adapt.
Foster open communication and collaboration among teams.

Final thoughts

While continuous delivery is often combined with continuous integration and shortened to CI/CD, research shows that continuous integration is only one element of implementing continuous delivery.

To achieve reliable, low-risk releases, you need close collaboration between everyone involved in the software delivery process, not just software developers, and your team needs to adopt new ways of working and learn new skills.

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