Continuous Deployment

Conclusion and Next Steps

This book took you on the full journey of continuous deployment. After a theoretical introduction in Part I, we dove into the software delivery life cycle in Part II, where we discussed how to prepare a sturdy and production-ready backlog, split features with the flexibility of granular deployments in mind, and make every increment production ready from its inception. This was followed by Part III, where we dove even deeper, exploring the code itself and talking about breaking down user stories into small and immediate deployments to production—without disrupting our users and with backward compatibility kept in complex distributed systems. Finally, in Part IV, you learned how to put this knowledge into practice by using exploratory testing in production and releasing changes gradually and safely, which unlocks data-driven product experimentation.

Throughout the book, we explored the benefits and challenges of continuous deployment and the mindset shift required to embrace this practice fully. I hope you learned something new when reading this book because I certainly learned a lot while writing it.

In Part V, I have included some case studies from companies practicing continuous deployment “in the wild.” Continuous delivery has become a well-loved practice for the engineers I interviewed, enabling them to deliver high-quality software at an unprecedented pace. By automating every step of code’s path to production, their teams can now iterate, respond ...