Today, we’re exploring all elements of Continuous Development.
As a key practice within Agile software development, designed to enhance the speed and quality of your product and delivery, we’re here to guide you through all its complexities and considerations.
Let’s start with a basic explanation of the practice, before moving on to the benefits it can deliver to your organisation. We’ll then take a deeper dive into CI/CD.
What is continuous development?
Continuous Development is an iterative process, most commonly found in software development and IT teams. The idea is that you break down work into small batches, continually releasing updates, reviewing work and making improvements in an ongoing cycle.
Now, Continuous Development – which you could also term as Continuous Delivery Pipeline – is actually an umbrella term for several different elements:
Continuous Integration
Continuous Testing
Continuous Delivery
- Continuous Deployment
These are all DevOps processes and, when combined, they form a loop of releasing, testing, improving and delivery. In other words, Continuous Development (or Continuous Pipeline Delivery).
We’ll take a closer look at some of these different elements later on in this post.
Continuous vs Discontinuous Development
Whilst Continuous Development advocates an iterative approach to working practices by integrating processes, tasks and teams within one seamless loop, Discontinuous Development centres on work that takes place in very specific stages.
Discontinuous Development has less flow than Continuous Development, with fixed start and end points for each stage of the process. Whilst we would generally encourage a more Agile approach to work, especially in software development teams, there may be projects on other business areas where Discontinuous Development is appropriate.
Continuous Development vs Agile
Continuous Development is a process, whereas Agile is a broader philosophy and mindset.
Continuous practices align with Agile principles, such as breaking work down into small increments, and implementing a culture of ongoing learning and feedback.
Most Agile frameworks, like Scrum or Kanban, incorporate elements of Continuous Development.
Continuous Development vs Waterfall
Waterfall is the name given to a more traditional style of project management, whereby work is delivered from beginning to end. Continuous Development, with its cycle of reviewing and improving, is at odds with the Waterfall approach, and is more closely aligned with the Agile mindset.
There may still be some advocates for Waterfall out there, but many teams struggle with its rigidity and and linear structure. With less room to try new things, and potentially fail, mistakes are seen not as learning opportunities, but as costly and time-consuming problems to resolve.
Generally, organisations find the iterative and flexible aspects of Agile result in more successful outcomes – again, especially in software development teams.
What are the benefits of Continuous Development?
Continuous practices, when well-embedded and as part of an overall Agile way of working, can deliver notable benefits for both your team and the wider organisation.
- Respond more quickly to feedback: With a continuous feedback loop firmly embedded in your processes, your team can respond efficiently and holistically to feedback throughout your entire development and delivery cycle.
- Better product quality: Faster feedback, ongoing improvements and continuous testing all combine, ultimately, to a higher quality output than you might achieve with more traditional methods.
- Faster speed to market: Because work is broken into smaller increments and feedback and testing is integrated in a continuous cycle, products and services are delivered highly efficiently.
- Enhanced customer satisfaction: Continuous Development practices enable teams to respond quickly to change or client feedback, and to pivot when necessary to truly meet to customer needs.
- Improved visibility and trust: DevOps practices contribute to an overarching culture of transparency. With cyclical releases, feedback and testing, teams from ground-level engineers to senior leadership can easily track the progress and delivery of work. This work tracking can be enhanced by using Agile project management tools like Jira, which support continuous development processes.
- Enhanced productivity: When a team benefits from trust, autonomy and a good flow of work, they tend to be more productive.
- A culture of failing fast and learning from mistakes: Continuous Development encourages a culture whereby mistakes are recognised as learning opportunities and there isn’t a fear of failure. This environment also leads to faster delivery, as bugs, problems or issues are identified (and resolved) more quickly.
- Keep pace with – or stay ahead of – competitors: By working iteratively, teams are in a strong position to respond quickly to changes – be they customer-led, regulatory or as a result of competitive forces. Pivoting quickly can give you a competitive edge over your closest rivals, demonstrating your responsiveness to customer needs or ability to comply with new legislation, for example.
- Decreased risk and costs: Identifying issues early means you can resolve them more quickly and with less investment – rather than following a product or service all the way through to delivery and testing – and then realising there’s a fundamental error. (This is one of the risks that could occur with Discontinuous Development, or if a team takes the Waterfall approach to project management.)
- Reduced error and risk: Both Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery/Deployment (CI/CD) centre on frequent integration, testing and release. This can reduce the risk of overlooked code failures and mistakes.
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Spotlight on Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment or Continuous Delivery (CD)
CI/CD stands for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery and/or Deployment.
Now, if these terms sound familiar, it’s because they’re some of the DevOps processes which, collectively, make up Continuous Development.
What is Continuous Integration?
Continuous Integration is a software development practice, whereby teams regularly integrate code changes during the development process, to continually integrate and maintain a fixed release cadence. Continuous Integration includes a lot of automated steps, such as the executions of tests and potentially code builds.
Each time a code change is integrated, this triggers automatic testing. With this frequent change and test process, issues should be easier and quicker to identify – and therefore faster to resolve, too.
What is Continuous Delivery/Deployment?
Whilst Continuous Integration applies to the build phase, Continuous Delivery and/or Deployment relates to the process of releasing the updated application to higher environments, up to and including production.
This is a process that benefits heavily from automation, ensuring that the right builds end up in the right places at the right time, and preventing deployment to the next stage before the necessary tests have been completed.
Taking this approach means, again, that any issues should be flagged instantly and that faulty code cannot make it to the live environment. Smaller, incremental deployments to production environments also help take the pressure of big releases off developers, while meaning that each release has fewer changes and, as such, fewer things to go wrong.
Continuous Development consultancy
To truly benefit from DevOps processes like those within Continuous Development, it essential to establish the right working culture and environment first. You may also need support with DevOps tooling and technologies, or perhaps need some guidance on best practice to ensure you embed sustainable ways of working.
Here at AC, we can guide you through your entire software development lifecycle in order to unlock your potential and maximise value.
With years of proven experience in DevOps strategy, CI/CD best practice, Agile consultancy and, ultimately, Digital Transformations, turn to us to guide you through this next step in your journey.
