Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation

Chapter 7. The Commit Stage

Introduction

The commit stage begins with a change to the state of the project—that is, a commit to the version control system. It ends with either a report of failure or, if successful, a collection of binary artifacts and deployable assemblies to be used in subsequent test and release stages, as well as reports on the state of the application. Ideally, a commit stage should take less than five minutes to run, and certainly no more than ten.

The commit stage represents, in more ways than one, the entrance into the deployment pipeline. Not only is it the point at which a new release candidate is created; it is also where many teams start when they begin to implement a deployment pipeline. When a team implements the ...