Continuous Delivery is all the rage for dev teams and the release management / application delivery marketplace. And rightfully so, as it is the application delivery methodology that lets App Dev deliver the code. It saves time and money as it cuts the time for applications to be delivered into production.
A key driver for Continuous Delivery has been the adoption of Agile as a development methodology. Most of our long-term application lifecycle management (ALM) customers have implemented at least some agile development processes, and Continuous Delivery is next up for them.
At Agile 2012 last year, we surveyed the audience and found that 49% of the respondents’ companies have significantly adopted the use of Agile for development. And 55% of those respondents said that they are “already there” or “getting there” in the use of Continuous Delivery. Take a look at the infographic from the Agile 2012 conference and survey. Note also that we’ll be at Agile 2013 in August and we’ll rerun the survey and provide our annual Agile Conference Survey report for you! We’ll see what the adoption rate for Continuous Delivery is after another year.
While Continuous Delivery does provide great value, it is not appropriate for all application deployments. Many applications require a separation of duties: App Dev develops and IT Ops deploys. Hence, deployments into production follow the traditional stage gate methodology and are handled by IT Operations. This hybrid of Continuous Delivery and Stage Gate Delivery is Continuous Deployment; it can be implemented with Release Automation plus release process control and management of the hand-offs between App Dev and IT Ops.
To learn how you can implement Continuous Delivery as quickly as possible while still supporting the traditional stage gate delivery process, watch our recent webcast “Implement Continuous Delivery with Traditional App Dev Processes“ featuring Julian Fish, Director of Development for Serena Release Manager.
