Software Engineering at Google

Chapter 24. Continuous Delivery

Written by Radha Narayan, Bobbi Jones, Sheri Shipe, and David Owens

Edited by Lisa Carey

Given how quickly and unpredictably the technology landscape shifts, the competitive advantage for any product lies in its ability to quickly go to market. An organization’s velocity is a critical factor in its ability to compete with other players, maintain product and service quality, or adapt to new regulation. This velocity is bottlenecked by the time to deployment. Deployment doesn’t just happen once at initial launch. There is a saying among educators that no lesson plan survives its first contact with the student body. In much the same way, no software is perfect at first launch, and the only guarantee is that you’ll have to update it. Quickly.

The long-term life cycle of a software product involves rapid exploration of new ideas, rapid responses to landscape shifts or user issues, and enabling developer velocity at scale. From Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar to Eric Reis’ The Lean Startup, the key to any organization’s long-term success has always been in its ability to get ideas executed and into users’ hands as quickly as possible and reacting quickly to their feedback. Martin Fowler, in his book Continuous Delivery (aka CD), points out that “The biggest risk to any software effort is that you end up building something that isn’t useful. The earlier and more frequently you get working software in front of real users, the quicker you get ...