Tools and Practices for Successful Continuous Delivery
Tools
- Version Control: GIT, SVN, Bitbucket, GitLab, GitHub and Mercurial are some of the version control tools that aids in the continuous delivery process. The version control tools help to track code changes, manage versions and collaborate with team for all code updates.
- CI/CD Tools: Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, Azure DevOps and CircleCI are some of the best CI/CD tools, which help to navigate development delivery.
- Testing Tools: Selenium, Jira, Bugzilla, JMeter and LoadRunner are some of the testing and bug tracking tools.
Other Tools
- Ansible: It is used for configuration management, software deployment and task automation.
- Chef and Puppet: They are configuration management tools used for automation of infrastructure management.
Best Practices
- Automate everything: Automation of continuous delivery process is the key to reducing human errors, saving time, and ensuring consistency of continuous delivery.
- Use Version Control: Using the version control helps to track and manage changes to code base and roll back to previous versions, if situations arise. So version control tools should be used for code, scripts, configurations and documentation.
- Implement Testing strategy: Testing of the code is very essential to ensure quality and reliability before delivery. Testing strategy should be implemented to cover different types of tests like Unit test, Integration Test, Functional and Performance Tests. Testing tools should be used to run tests frequently
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Implement the IaC to define and manage infrastructure using code for consistent and continuous deployment.
- Monitoring and Feedback: To make the Continuous Delivery successful, continuous monitoring of the deployed applications and gathering feedback from users is very crucial.
- Adopt a Culture of Collaboration: For successful continuous delivery, fostering a culture of collaboration and continuous improvement is the key within the team members, stakeholders, and users.
What is Continuous Delivery (CD) in Agile?
Software delivery and deployment have evolved over the years from manual processes to automated processes. During the days of the manual delivery process, once the deployment to the production server is ready, a major update is done during the night or when no users are accessing the server and there would be long server downtime but using the agile continuous delivery method, small iterations of changes are added seamlessly with the automated delivery process. In this article, let us discuss the continuous delivery process in Agile.