Chapter 2. Benefits
Adopting continuous deployment is a significant cultural undertaking for any team, even those that have a mature engineering culture and are already comfortable with continuous delivery. For continuous deployment to work well, it requires a comprehensive safety net of practices and buy-in at all levels, from management to newly hired junior developers. This might seem daunting, but the payoff has been high for the many companies that have achieved it and are doing it successfully.
In this chapter, we will focus on those payoffs: why continuous deployment is worth the effort and why we should bother with the cultural and technical changes required to send every commit to production. By reading this chapter you will know more about these benefits, and by reading the rest of the book you’ll find out how to realize them.
We can summarize the benefits of continuous deployment as follows:
Improves the efficiency of the software value stream by reducing waste and rework (minimization of batches and queues of inventory)
Reduces time from customer order to change applied in production (lead time and cycle time)
Dramatically increases deployment frequency, which is a core indicator of engineering health
Reduces the rate of faulty changes applied to production
Reduces the mean time to recover from faulty changes
Moves quality control earlier in the development process, improving collaboration between roles
Increases engineering ownership, which prevents handovers of ...
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