Part III

Introduction

In Part III, our goal is to create the technical practices and architecture required to enable and sustain the fast flow of work from Development into Operations without causing chaos and disruption to the production environment or our customers. This means we need to reduce the risk associated with deploying and releasing changes into production. We will do this by implementing a set of technical practices known as continuous delivery.

Continuous delivery includes creating the foundations of our automated deployment pipeline, ensuring that we have automated tests that constantly validate that we are in a deployable state, having developers integrate their code into trunk daily, and architecting our environments and code to enable low-risk releases. Primary focuses within these chapters include:

• Creating the foundation of our deployment pipeline
• Enabling fast and reliable automated testing
• Enabling and practicing continuous integration and testing
• Automating, enabling, and architecting for low-risk releases

Implementing these practices reduces the lead time to get production-like environments, enables continuous testing that gives everyone fast feedback on their work, enables small teams to safely and independently develop, test, and deploy their code into production, and makes production deployments and releases a routine part of daily work.

Furthermore, integrating the objectives of QA and Operations into everyone’s daily work reduces firefighting, hardship, and toil, while making people more productive and increasing joy in the work we do. We not only improve outcomes, but our organization is better able to win in the marketplace.