Perforce Software today recommended best practices for Continuous Delivery, a software development and release methodology spreading rapidly across a wide range of industries and end products. Based on insights gained from serving as the versioning platform for hundreds of organisations that already migrated to Continuous Delivery, Perforce shared how companies can move to faster release cadences through more automated processes.
Continuous Delivery enables businesses to provide better products faster by allowing software to be released into production at any time. It centres on building a development pipeline where early feedback, automated build and test, and incremental deployments can dramatically speed up product and application release cycles. Many businesses are embracing this as a competitive advantage that allows them to accelerate time to market without sacrificing quality.
“Companies can no longer afford to wait until the end of long development and release cycles to find out if they’re keeping up with market demands,” said Christopher Seiwald, founder and CEO, Perforce Software. “Many of our customers were early to recognise this shift in the marketplace and they trusted Perforce to serve as their versioning platform and a single source of truth for all their assets - two crucial components to practicing Continuous Delivery.”
Key insights into Continuous Delivery best practices include:
Track Every Change: Recording every change, event and transaction is hugely valuable in situations where a rollback to a previous version is required. Altering history should be prohibited, especially when compliance and industry regulations demand stringent recordkeeping.
Think beyond Code: Continuous Delivery is focused on more than just code. Every element of a product needs to be consistently versioned from development to deployment, including artwork and other binary files, chip architectures, CAD designs, documentation, configuration scripts, and more.
Put It All in One Place: Instead of maintaining silos of code and assets, and project-specific branches, implement a “single source of truth” for the entire production environment. If assets and artifacts are distributed in multiple locations and multiple stores, there is a risk of introducing new errors and failing to meet delivery deadlines. A unified repository can hold all of a company’s assets and support virtually unlimited scaling.
Automate, Automate, Automate: In a highly automated environment, changes to code can be almost instantly checked for integration into the delivery package. “Failed” changes can then be immediately corrected by the development team to ensure a high level of efficiency, predictability and repeatability – key attributes to a successful Continuous Delivery approach.
Proactive Collaboration across the Lifecycle: Stakeholders must have visibility and input into what gets built and released. Peers should participate in reviews and collectively push for a higher bar for quality. An independent study published in January 2014 shows that 96 percent of IT professionals view their collaboration platform as important to Continuous Delivery.
To download the complete Best Practices Report “Continuous Delivery: Five Habits of Highly Successful Practitioners,” visit
http://info.perforce.com/continuous-delivery-five-habits-successful-practitioners.htmlTo download the “Continuous Delivery in Practice” report, visit
http://info.perforce.com/guide-continuous-delivery-accelerating-improving-releases.html
