The Road to Continuous Delivery

This is the title of a talk my colleague Tommy Tynjä is presenting at JavaOne in São Paulo next week. In this presentation, he shares his experience of state-of-the-art Continuous Delivery in a fast-growing finance company under heavy regulations. This post is not about his talk but rather a reflection of how long the DevOps and Continuous Delivery movement has come.

When I started this journey, preaching, teaching and practising Continuous Delivery and DevOps, almost nobody knew about the concepts. We have come a long way since then and It’s so nice to see that even the big conferences like JavaOne now have tracks that include Continuous Delivery as a first class citizen. This makes a huge difference since it will expose the ideas to a much larger audience and reach people that are not actively looking for it.

So is Continuous Delivery becoming mainstream? Yes, it probably is and this is a fantastic thing! Less energy is needed to convince decision makers and more energy can be spent on actually implementing the concepts. I think we are now on the verge going from early adopters to the early majority in the famous technology adoption life cycle and it makes sense to reflect on what that means for us who persistently strive to teach and adopt Continuous Delivery in the industry.

The innovators and early adopters have been the champions and evangelists for Continuous Delivery, opinion makers that see the potential at the end of the struggle and therefore are willing to take more risks and try different solutions until they succeed.

What we see now are people and organisations that need a good foundation of proven practises to start their change. The early majority are after results and not so much about the learnings that lead them there. In particular, they need examples of successful transformations that they can relate to in terms of both business and technology.

Continuous Delivery is proven to be applicable everywhere, not only for modern tech stacks, and we can see more and more adoption in old legacy systems with many years of technical debt. We see organisations taking control of their outsourcing, databases, CRM systems and many other parts that make up the typical complex IT structure of almost any company today. While these companies are taking their first steps on the maturity ladder, others are pushing the boundaries in the other end. Benefitting from new technology and investing heavily in the technical excellence needed to maintain a fast and automated delivery process.

So, what’s next? I’d love to hear your thoughts so please write a comment, but personally, I think the biggest shift is yet to come.

The awareness of Continuous Delivery is starting to reach the IT management level but I find that it is getting stuck there as an IT internal agile initiative. However, I believe that within the next few years the awareness will also reach the business side who will learn how to utilise this new capability to really accelerate innovation and find completely new ways of developing the business.

I believe that we have very exciting times ahead and that there is much work still to be done before Continuous Delivery is mainstream.