The Textbook Definition of #ContinuousDelivery | @DevOpsSummit #DevOps

To paraphrase Kent Beck: software delivers no value apart from runtime. Ideas take physical form in hardware, virtualized only part of the way down, and someone other than the developers makes the ideas manifest. So then: ops folks are the crop’s caretakers; developers design the seeds. Well, of course this isn’t true. Developers don’t turn pie-in-the-sky math into socially constructive math that sysadmins then make useful. No: developers write code that makes things happen. We care about runtime just as much as ops, so we need to know how our software is helping people in reality—and how it can do a better job—in order for us to refine both the ideas and the implementation. So cycle-time shortening—the metric of continuous delivery, and one of the Twelve Principles of Agile Software—is equally about users and makers. Working software delivered sooner is better for users than equally working software delivered later. And informative feedback gleaned more quickly from real-world use is better for developers than equally informative feedback gathered more slowly. Your customers’ problem space measures your software’s value better than your requirements specification ever could. Calibrate against that space as often as you can.

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