I was recently asked to contribute to an eBook from Zend about moving to Continuous Delivery (CD). The 29 authors in the book share a wide range of experience with CD, and there is plenty of useful advice;  the contributions from Mathias Meyer (@roidrage), Kate Matsudaira (@katemats), and Jamie Ingilby (@jamiei) are particularly worth reading, I think.

In my section of the book I explain how using ThoughtWorks GO to model the testing and release steps (effectively part of the value stream) we won trust from several different people and teams during a move to CD. Using a prototype also helped us to validate the activities undertaken:

We tried to empathize with their situation and, using role-based security in the deployment pipeline, uncovered enough information to give them a sense of visibility and control.

Without being able to visualise and communicate easily the activities we were automating, progress would have been slow or even blocked.

Get a free copy of the eBook here: http://bit.ly/ZendCDbook