Continuous Delivery
Equipped for the momentum of digitalisation with continuous delivery
Companies that meet their customers’ needs faster and more accurately than the competition are at a significant advantage. The momentum with which markets and requirements are changing needs to be mirrored in software development. Continuous integration, continuous delivery and continuous deployment are particularly efficient development practices for the fast-moving environment of digitalisation. Continuous delivery supports companies in consistent agile software development throughout the entire lifecycle. Continuous delivery automates your infrastructure management and deployments, enabling you to handle agile software projects more efficiently and cost-effectively.
+49 7541 70078-733The fast-moving environment of digitalisation often presents challenges for software projects:
- Business processes are increasingly dependent on software. Economic damage occurs when software applications do not function reliably.
- Software in the corporate environment is becoming increasingly complex
- New competition is emerging from globalisation and other industries. This is why it’s important to shorten time-to-market and be able to react quickly to changes.
- Manual processes are more expensive than automated ones and need to be gradually eliminated in order to remain competitive in the context of digital transformation.
This means that companies which do not confront the topic of continuous delivery in the short or medium term will have little hope of surviving the future market.
Large corporations like Google and Amazon, but also German companies such as the Otto group, have paved the way and are already using continuous delivery to instantly release new features to their customers.
Continuous integration vs. continuous delivery vs. continuous deployment: Methods for efficient, automated software development
![[Translate to Englisch:] Abgrenzung der Begriffe Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery und Continuous Deployment](/fileadmin/_processed_/6/8/csm_continuous_delivery_definition_e959eaa251.png "[Translate to Englisch:] Continuous Integration vs. Delivery vs. Deployment")
Continuous delivery brings agility and quality to your software development
The key to success with continuous delivery lies in automation. A continuous ability to deliver high-quality software is achieved which would not be feasible with a manual process chain.
The benefits are considerable:
- Long-term cost reduction: The high degree of automation in testing, infrastructure and deployment saves costs in the long term.
- Risk minimisation: Manual processes are prone to errors and not reproducible. Through deployment automation, manual processes are minimised – and so are your risks.
- Faster time-to-market: Individual features can be produced more quickly with continuous delivery since the development process is faster and more agile.
- No more downtime: Long installation lists and hours of downtime are a thing of the past with continuous delivery since the entire process is automated.
- Agile project approach: Continuous delivery supports agile project methods. Adherence to incremental delivery is simpler using continuous delivery since the delivery, quality assurance and integration of bug fixes is greatly accelerated. Sprints with little business value (bug fix sprints, delivery sprints, refactoring sprints) are avoided and there is a true definition of done (DoD).
- Quality improvement: Manual testing is time-consuming and is neglected in many projects due to lack of time. Automated module, integration and acceptance testing enhances the quality of your software.
doubleSlash is your partner for continuous delivery – from setting up the continuous delivery pipeline to continuous testing
Continuous integration and continuous delivery are nothing new to us. We’ve been working with these development methods for a number of years now and have gathered experience and best practices across a variety of projects:
- Using continuous delivery together with container technologies and microservice architectures significantly reduces your time-to-market and improves the stability of your systems.
- Thanks to continuous delivery, downtime in production installations can be reduced by over 90 percent.
- By using automated testing in the continuous delivery pipeline, we can keep the quality of the software and the code consistently high in a long-term project, remove errors and increase the efficiency of recurring processes. The side effects of code changes are massively reduced.
- The fast feedback loops achieved through continuous delivery keep costs for error analysis and bug fixing at a low level.
Example of a continuous delivery pipeline
Not all of the steps shown are mandatory for setting up a continuous delivery pipeline. We will be happy to advise you, taking account of your individual requirements and needs.
- Build: The project is built, in other words, the source code is complied.
- Unit testing: Unit testing is performed. The smallest individual units of the software are tested.
- Static program analysis: Bugs & vulnerability (SQL injection), code smells (violation of coding standards or needless complexity), measurement of test coverage or redundant code.
- Deploy to test: Automatic installation of the application on the test environment.
- Execution of integration tests: testing of REST interfaces, interaction with other systems such as interface partners or databases.
- Acceptance testing: Use cases are tested in the browser, for example.
- Security testing: with HP-Fortify or OWASP scanning tools.
- Load testing: For checking the impact of code changes on the load behaviour.
- Deploy to approval: Once all automated testing has been completed, the system is installed in the approval environment.
- Exploratory testing: Manual tests such as usability tests or tests run by the specialist department can also be performed in this environment.
We offer you continuous delivery using state-of-the-art technologies
Continuous delivery consulting
- Support in implementing continuous delivery (processes, service providers, operation)
- Evaluation of the framework and scope within which your company can feasibly use continuous delivery in view of the DevOps approach and your corporate culture
- Answering questions regarding the prerequisites for continuous delivery
- Customer workshops
Advice on choosing tools for continuous delivery pipelines
- Build tools (Maven, Gradle, Gulp, NPM)
- Test frameworks (JUnit,TestNG, Cucumber, SOAP-UI, Selenium, JMeter, Gatling, OWASP)
- Code analysis (Sonar, TSLint)
- Tools for configuration management and deployment automation (Ansible, Puppet, Chef, Jenkins, Bamboo)
- Support with the planning and implementation of tools for a high-availability setup
Setting up and configuring continuous delivery pipelines for your specific project requirements
- Evaluation of the various steps in the continuous delivery pipeline in terms of which ones make sense for your project.
- We have extensive expertise in related technologies, such as containers, PaaS and microservices, and set up modern continuous delivery pipelines for you.
Tested and certified for use in your company
The use of motivated and qualified employees (Germany's best employers 2017, IREB, OCEB, ISAQB, etc.) and the use of modern technologies are the basis for successful customer projects. Read in our references.
Interested in implementing continuous delivery to automate your software development and increase efficiency?
We will be happy to help you implement continuous delivery in your company. Whether it’s setting up a continuous delivery pipeline or support with tool selection – get in touch with us!
