A roadmap with clear, incremental objectives is key to a successful digital transformation. Without it, executives and IT leaders can be overwhelmed by the size of the project.  

At Ekulus we believe successful digital experiences are achieved through iteration -where new features are being regularly added, measured, adjusted and pruned, based on business objectives, user feedback and usage data. Leveraging agile processes and technologies that support frequent, if not continuous, integration and product releases is critical in achieving effective digital results.

Continuous Delivery is the ability to get changes of all types—including new features, configuration changes, bug fixes and experiments—into production, or into the hands of users, safely and quickly in a sustainable way.

Our goal is to make deployments—whether of a large-scale distributed system, a complex production environment, an embedded system, or an app—predictable, routine affairs that can be performed on demand.

Why continuous delivery?

The practices at the heart of continuous delivery help us achieve several important benefits:

·     Low risk releases.The primary goal of continuous delivery is to make software deployments painless, low-risk events that can be performed at any time, on demand. 

·     Faster time to market.It’s not uncommon for the integration and test/fix phase of the traditional phased software delivery lifecycle to consume weeks or even months. When teams work together to automate the build and deployment, environment provisioning, and regression testing processes, developers can incorporate integration and regression testing into their daily work and completely remove these phases. 

·     Higher quality. When developers have automated tools that discover regressions within minutes, teams are freed to focus their effort on user research and higher level testing activities such as exploratory testing, usability testing, and performance and security testing. 

·     Lower costs.Any successful software product or service will evolve significantly over the course of its lifetime. By investing in build, test, deployment and environment automation, we substantially reduce the cost of making and delivering incremental changes to software by eliminating many of the fixed costs associated with the release process.

·     Better products.Continuous delivery makes it economic to work in small batches. This means we can get feedback from users throughout the delivery lifecycle based on working software. 

·     Happier teams. When we release more frequently, software delivery teams can engage more actively with users, learn which ideas work and which don’t, and see first-hand the outcomes of the work they have done. By removing the low-value painful activities associated with software delivery, we can focus on what we care about most—continuously delighting our users.

If this sounds too good to be true, bear in mind: continuous delivery is not magic. It’s about continuous, daily improvement and planning your project rollout to align with business priorities. Contact us to find out how we can help you plan your project for success.