I was recently asked to answer some questions about Continuous Delivery for someone’s undergraduate university research. The questions were interesting, so here are my answers 🙂

1. What do you feel are the benefits of adopting Continuous Delivery?
2. How do you feel adopting Continuous Delivery has affected your development cycle?
3. Do you think Continuous Delivery is an important approach for a company to pick up, If so Why?
4. How do you think Agile compares to more traditional models like Waterfall?
5. What is the biggest change you’ve noticed since adopting Agile?
6. What do you foresee in the future for these models in the industry?

1. What do you feel are the benefits of adopting Continuous Delivery?

The benefits of Continuous Delivery are huge:

• Greater focus on finishing and shipping.
• Increased awareness of need for setting up the work to enable feedback and learning.
• Sense of ‘flow’ within teams.
• Decisions made using actual data rather than opinions alone.
• Higher quality software.
• More joy in work.

(Can I stop yet?)

2. How do you feel adopting Continuous Delivery has affected your development cycle?

(Answering on behalf of our clients) Continuous Delivery has helped us to increase the ownership over software and focus on the value-add things that our organisation produces, rather than ceremonies around testing and releasing.

3. Do you think Continuous Delivery is an important approach for a company to pick up, If so Why?

Yes: adopting CD properly can be truly transformative for the organisation as a whole. IT becomes a means to receive rapid feedback on product/marketing/service offerings, allowing the business to invest more wisely and do more with less risk and lower costs.

4. How do you think Agile compares to more traditional models like Waterfall?

Agile is woefully misunderstood (as was Waterfall) so in that regard, they are similar (!). Truly agile organisations are rare because agility challenges entrenched, comfortable positions within an organisation. Agile done well really makes the nature of an organisation transparent.

5. What is the biggest change you’ve noticed since adopting Agile?

(Answering for our clients) We’re able to improve the software delivery part of the process, but this has highlighted the lack of clarity and vision in the Business.

6. What do you foresee in the future for these models in the industry?

We’re starting to see a backlash against Agile and DevOps already, because people misunderstand or misrepresent what’s going on. Things like SAFe seem to be rebranded PRINCE2 which is a shame. Essentially, many organisations are going to fail because their management does not see the need to change.

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At Skelton Thatcher Consulting we have put together a handy Continuous Delivery checklist template (on Trello) to help you assess the things you need to address within your organisation:

See cdchecklist.info