Introduction

This book is mainly aimed at practitioners. However, implementing continuous delivery involves more than just buying some tools and doing some automation work. It depends on effective collaboration between everyone involved in delivery, support from executive sponsors, and willingness of people on the ground to make changes. This chapter is written to provide guidance on how to make continuous delivery work within your organization. First, we present a maturity model for configuration and release management. Next, we will explore how to plan your project’s lifecycle, including release. Then we describe an approach to risk management of build and release in software projects. Finally, we take a look at the common organizational risks and antipatterns involved in deployment, along with best practices and patterns to help you to avoid them.

Before we get started, we wanted to present the overall value proposition of continuous delivery. Continuous delivery is more than just a new delivery methodology. It is a whole new paradigm for running a business that depends on software. To understand why this is so, we need to examine a fundamental tension at the heart of corporate governance.