The Current State of Continuous Delivery

Earlier in the year, CloudBees’s CEO Steve Brodie wrote a great post predicting that 2014 is the year of continuous delivery .
Our friends at Perforce completed a survey back in January where 37 of respondents reported that they had adopted Continuous Delivery (CD) for some projects, and that 46 worry their competitors are using Continuous Delivery to get ahead.
Those are interesting numbers. They highlight the competitive advantage that today’s software-driven businesses assign to the ability to deliver value more quickly through frequent releases.

3 months later, what has changed? To find out, we co-sponsored a DZone survey of 500 IT Professionals to analyze the state of the market. Among other insights the survey provides, this new research tells a slightly different story from earlier research because it applies an arguably more stringent set of criteria around the question of “are you practicing continuous delivery?”
The additional criteria applied were:

1. Is your software always in a shippable state?

2. Do all stakeholders have visibility into production readiness?

3. Can you perform push-button deployments of any desired version of your software to any environment on-demand?

We were very surprised by the numbers that came back.
Only 8 of those surveyed by DZone reported that they had both:

1. Adopted Continuous Delivery for some or all projects, and

2. Answered “yes” for all three questions of the more stringent criteria listed above.

That’s a difference of almost 30 from the earlier survey.
Why does this difference matter, and what might it mean? Well, we know that practicing Continuous Delivery does NOT necessarily mean you practice continuous deployment. However, it is widely agreed that the ability to deploy on-demand is a pre-requisite for achieving CD.
The data seems to be telling us that, while many organizations are eager to achieve CD, not all of them have the capabilities necessary to visualize and automate the entire end-to-end software production process, from Continuous Integration (CI) through to Application Release Automation (ARA).
While there are many point solutions out there which provide one of these core capabilities, there are not many that provide both. We believe that having a single, common platform to provide both CI and ARA eliminates manual handoffs between teams and variability between QA and production deployments. It also provides stakeholders a single source of truth about the state of any given pipeline.
Continuous Delivery is an iterative process. To learn more about the CD state of affairs and how others are going about implementing CD download the full CD Research report by DZone. The report contains a wealth of survey analysis, informative infographics, and related articles written by industry experts. We hope it proves helpful to you, wherever you are on your journey.
Additionally, we’d love to hear your thoughts on the survey, and what YOU think the data is telling us. Where are you on your Continuous Delivery journey? What lessons have you learned which others in the CloudBees community can benefit from?
Hit us up on the Comments section or @electriccloud
You can download the full 30+ page report here