Continuous Delivery helps organizations of all sizes stay agile, lean, and innovative. By using reliable, lower-risk releases, software partners make it incredibly efficient and possible to continuously integrate software that is in line with market changes, user feedback, and altering business strategies. Support, development, test and operations can work side by side as a single delivery team to automate and streamline the entire development process.

When comparing software partners, look out for organizations that practice continuous delivery. If not completely continuous, then at least very frequent!

Continuous Delivery might be viewed as a technical practice, but it goes way beyond that. Here are some of the benefits of working with partners who have successfully implemented Continuous Delivery into their development process.

Competitive Advantage

The Continuous Delivery approach allows organizations to gain benefits much earlier on in the development process. By releasing certain benefits early, companies may start gaining revenue that can actually help further fund development. In addition, by being able to pour out small benefits at the start, you can actually stay ahead of your competition. In the business world, whoever makes the first move has a clear advantage. Historically, the first to market establishes long-term leadership in the industry.

Build the Right Product

One of the greatest features of Continuous Delivery is that it enables a team to receive continuous feedback from users and shareholders. Frequent feedback makes it possible to integrate on-going knowledge into the build, which in turn affects the quality, success, and relevance of the final product. By extending the use of Continuous Delivery beyond internal use, real insights and metrics can actually be gained from real software usage. This leads to more useful features being developed earlier, and less useful features being abandoned earlier. Therefore, you spend time and efforts on the areas that matter

Ability to React Quickly and Respond to Change

Change will come. No one can stop it. In the business world, regardless of industry, things are changing faster than they ever have in the past. This constant change brings up many challenges. The constant change of technology makes it impossible for companies to keep up, and the economic tidal shifts make decisions uncertain.

Continuous Delivery does not completely shield you from change, but it does make it possible to properly react to them without losing a large amount of time and money. This leaves companies with more resources to explore new opportunities and new revenue streams.

Reliability & Stability

Traditional methods that include infrequent releases make change a very risky and unstable thing, which often leads to serious problems. Continuous Delivery enables organizations to deliver more stability and reliability by releasing updates more frequently. This makes it easy to manage change and reduce risks because you can see what is taking place within each release. It makes it easier to fix any problems that pop up, thus minimizing costs and impact.

Innovation

Continuous Delivery automatically gives you feedback that is more frequent from the user. As a result, developers are closer and more in-sync with the needs of the customer. Frequent releases helps a team identify what is really needed, and sometimes what they did not know was needed. Users can sometimes be satisfied with everything that they have; however, developers may be able to create new innovations that can improve existing systems.

Efficiency

Teams that implement Continuous Delivery processes have to automate their deployment tasks. Traditional teams often tend to skip this step, which results in problems caused by lack of understanding. Automating deployment can save a team time, which they can use to develop more valuable features.