DevOps is a big scary thing, but Continuous Delivery is not as scary as the big issues that surround DevOps. More importantly, it is what most teams want to have to get a smooth running software development pipeline.
In fact, whether you are using containers, virtualization, cloud, on-premises cloud, or EaaS– there is a flood of tools for automating IT tasks and moving to the cloud to omit those issues. The Infrastructure as Code movement and the tools to make it happen are increasing in use and ease-of-use. This is a big benefit of the new flood of tools and services, as they are key to Continuous Delivery.
DevOps has brought many cultural and political changes, which are often ignored by many companies during Agile implementation.
Using Continuous Delivery as a manufacturing production line with modern practices, such as Lean Software Development from Lean Manufacturing, gives us easy-to-understand ideas and practices in effort to improve our efficiency. Given the current state of Development integration with Ops, the toolset is not important. Therefore, it is not bizarre to state that Continuous Delivery is the Lean practice of “quality at every step.”
On top of all of this, testing needs to be automated. So, the most important way to look at the impact of Continuous Delivery on test teams is that all tests should be automated—and precisely—because every time there is a change somewhere, some subset of automated tests needs to run in order to validate consistency.
All the information aforementioned is included in the article “Mega Trends in Testing: Continuous Delivery, Production Line, and the Deployment Pipeline.”
