Today I attended a webinar by ThoughtWorks on Continuous Delivery. This is a practice of trying to minimize the duration between an idea and it’s release into a production system, without being reckless. The benefits are consistent with lean practices and customer development in that they get real feedback as quickly as possible to minimize waste.

The key is maintaining release-ready code though incremental changes and the webinar covers some techniques to achieve this. I’ve emphasized code as this encompasses all software, configuration and scripts.

I’ve already been loosely following this movement and implementing ad-hoc practices based on the objectives. However I haven’t been systematic; while we have a short cycle, we depend on key personnel to know a release is really okay to go out. There’s still much to do.

When they post the slides I’ll link to them as they’re excellent.

ThoughtWorks have posted the recording of the Introduction to Continuous Delivery webinar. I’m going to pinch some of the slides later.

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