AoAD2 Practice: Continuous Deployment

This is an excerpt from The Art of Agile Development, Second Edition. Visit the Second Edition home page for additional excerpts and more!

This excerpt is copyright 2007, 2021 by James Shore and Shane Warden. Although you are welcome to share this link, do not distribute or republish the content without James Shore’s express written permission.

Continuous Deployment

Audience
Programmers, Operations

Our latest code is in production.

If you use continuous integration, your team has removed most of the risk of releasing. Done correctly, continuous integration means your team is ready to release at any time. You’ve tested your code and exercised your deployment scripts.

Ally
Continuous Integration

One source of risk remains. If you don’t deploy your software to real production servers, it’s possible that your software won’t actually work in production. Differences in environment, traffic, and usage can all result in failures, even in the most carefully tested software.

Continuous deployment resolves this risk. It follows the same principle as continuous integration: by deploying small pieces frequently, you reduce the risk that a big change will cause problems, and you make it easy to find and fix problems when they do occur.

Although continuous deployment is a valuable practice for fluent Delivering teams, it’s optional. If your team is still developing their fluency, focus on the other practices first. Full adoption of continuous integration, including automated deployments to a test environment (which some people call “continuous delivery”), will give you nearly as much benefit.

...to continue reading, buy the book!

In this Section

  1. Continuous Deployment
    1. How to Use Continuous Deployment
    2. Detecting Deployment Failures
    3. Resolving Deployment Failures
      1. Sidebar: Stop the Line
      2. Roll back the deploy
      3. Fix the deploy
      4. Alternative: Fix forward
    4. Incremental Releases
    5. Data Migration
    6. Prerequisites
    7. Indicators
    8. Alternatives and Experiments
    9. Further Reading

Discuss the book on the AoAD2 mailing list or Discord server. For videos and interviews regarding the book, see the book club archive.

For more excerpts from the book, see the Second Edition home page.

If you liked this entry, check out my best writing and presentations, and consider subscribing to updates by email or RSS.