Continuous Delivery¶
Humble, J., & Farley, D. (2010). Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation. Addison-Wesley.
Cited by¶
12 citations across 12 artifacts.
Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.
Primes¶
- Abstract Work
- In software, the program is the work while a binary build, a running process, and a deployed container are instances; source versioning operates on the work, build pipelines on instances.
This sourceStandard software-engineering reference distinguishing the versioned program/source (operated on by version control) from the build artifacts and deployed instances produced by the build-and-release pipeline — the program-as-work / build-artifact-as-instance separation.
- In software, the program is the work while a binary build, a running process, and a deployed container are instances; source versioning operates on the work, build pipelines on instances.
- Chesterton's Fence
- The portable interventions follow directly from the descriptive prime and recur across substrates. Investigate before removing — in code, read the commit that introduced the line; in policy, read the legislative history; in conservation, study the species' role across seasons; in product, search prior research and incident reports. Record the constraint when erecting — comments that name the race condition a guard prevents, preambles that state a statute's purpose, design-rationale documents in engineering — because future reformers face the problem only when the past failed to encode the reason. Stage removal as an experiment — rather than wholesale removal, disable, shadow, or sunset the artifact and watch what breaks, the discipline behind feature flags and canary deployments.
This sourceDescribes feature flags and canary releases as staged, reversible exposure rather than wholesale change.
- The portable interventions follow directly from the descriptive prime and recur across substrates. Investigate before removing — in code, read the commit that introduced the line; in policy, read the legislative history; in conservation, study the species' role across seasons; in product, search prior research and incident reports. Record the constraint when erecting — comments that name the race condition a guard prevents, preambles that state a statute's purpose, design-rationale documents in engineering — because future reformers face the problem only when the past failed to encode the reason. Stage removal as an experiment — rather than wholesale removal, disable, shadow, or sunset the artifact and watch what breaks, the discipline behind feature flags and canary deployments.
- Controllability
- A platform engineering team at a global e-commerce company builds its "production controllability" initiative around explicit controllability reasoning
This sourceDefines the deployment pipeline and the build/test/deploy automation that make production changes fast, safe, and reversible.
- A platform engineering team at a global e-commerce company builds its "production controllability" initiative around explicit controllability reasoning
- Controlled Reentry
- The exit (quarantine, rollback, furlough, shutdown) may be rapid and binary; reentry is deliberately slower and graduated because the system is vulnerable, as Humble and Farley (2010) develop in the deployment-pipeline literature.
This sourceThe deployment-pipeline reference showing release as an active, staged, instrumented process.
- The exit (quarantine, rollback, furlough, shutdown) may be rapid and binary; reentry is deliberately slower and graduated because the system is vulnerable, as Humble and Farley (2010) develop in the deployment-pipeline literature.
- False Dilemma
- Naming the false dilemma forces enumeration of the suppressed residual: ship Friday with the buggy feature behind a feature flag disabled by default; ship a smaller release that excludes only the affected subsystem; ship Friday to a 5% canary cohort and hold the broad rollout one week; fix the specific bug with a two-day hotfix and ship the following Tuesday.
This sourceDescribes incremental release strategies — canary releases, staged rollouts, and decoupling deployment from release — that supply concrete alternatives beyond ship-now-or-slip, supporting the surfaced software-release residual options.
- Naming the false dilemma forces enumeration of the suppressed residual: ship Friday with the buggy feature behind a feature flag disabled by default; ship a smaller release that excludes only the affected subsystem; ship Friday to a 5% canary cohort and hold the broad rollout one week; fix the specific bug with a two-day hotfix and ship the following Tuesday.
- Intervention Stack Accretion
- The pattern recurs in security controls (defence-in-depth deployments each justified by a specific incident, producing alert fatigue and conflicting requirements, with periodic control rationalisation as the inverse), in organisational initiatives (change programmes, meeting cadences, OKRs, and training mandates accreting into "initiative fatigue," with "change moratoria" as the named reverse), in build systems and CI pipelines (pre-commit checks, lints, test stages, and deploy gates accreting, with pipeline-simplification sprints as the inverse),
This sourceTreats feature flags, deployment pipelines, and the combinatorial configuration space (2^N) that accreting flags and pipeline stages create, plus rationalization as the inverse.
- The pattern recurs in security controls (defence-in-depth deployments each justified by a specific incident, producing alert fatigue and conflicting requirements, with periodic control rationalisation as the inverse), in organisational initiatives (change programmes, meeting cadences, OKRs, and training mandates accreting into "initiative fatigue," with "change moratoria" as the named reverse), in build systems and CI pipelines (pre-commit checks, lints, test stages, and deploy gates accreting, with pipeline-simplification sprints as the inverse),
- Logistics Overreach
- from retail and platform engineering it imports roll-out gating and progressive deployment
This sourceEstablishes progressive/staged deployment and release gating as disciplines for advancing change no faster than operational support can sustain.
- from retail and platform engineering it imports roll-out gating and progressive deployment
- Script
- The ordered sequence is the causally chained stages — checkout, build, unit-test, integration-test, deploy-to-staging, deploy-to-production — each whose postcondition is the next stage's precondition:
This sourceDescribes the build-test-deploy pipeline as causally chained stages where each stage's postcondition gates the next and a failed check halts the run.
- The ordered sequence is the causally chained stages — checkout, build, unit-test, integration-test, deploy-to-staging, deploy-to-production — each whose postcondition is the next stage's precondition:
- Stage Gate Process
- Venture capital: pre-seed through later rounds, each committing more capital, requiring more evidence, and applying explicit gate criteria. Software releases: alpha, beta, release candidate, and general availability, each with explicit exit criteria and an escalation in user exposure.
This sourceCodifies the staged software deployment pipeline (build, test, release stages) with explicit exit criteria and escalating exposure from internal testing through release to production.
- Venture capital: pre-seed through later rounds, each committing more capital, requiring more evidence, and applying explicit gate criteria. Software releases: alpha, beta, release candidate, and general availability, each with explicit exit criteria and an escalation in user exposure.
Mechanisms¶
- CI/CD Pipeline
- The guarding discipline is the canary release: never promote to all users on gate-passage alone; expose the change to a small population
This sourcePresents canary releasing as staged exposure from an initial internal group to a small set of users before the majority.
- The guarding discipline is the canary release: never promote to all users on gate-passage alone; expose the change to a small population
- Feature-Flagged Strictness Rollout
- Its strength is that it makes tightening safe to attempt — it converts an all-or-nothing breaking change into a reversible experiment with a bounded blast radius, and the evidence gate means the decision to proceed rests on observed impact rather than hope.
This sourceDescribes reversible, limited-audience deployment with observation and rollback before broader release.
- Its strength is that it makes tightening safe to attempt — it converts an all-or-nothing breaking change into a reversible experiment with a bounded blast radius, and the evidence gate means the decision to proceed rests on observed impact rather than hope.
- Gradual Rollout Intensity
- Its strength is that it bounds the blast radius of a change and makes reversal nearly free — the operational form of a canary release.
This sourceDescribes canary release as deploying to a limited subset before broader rollout to reduce release risk.
- Its strength is that it bounds the blast radius of a change and makes reversal nearly free — the operational form of a canary release.
Verification¶
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Links previously used in the corpus¶
Before the registry existed this work was also linked 6 other ways.
- https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/continuous-delivery-reliable/9780321670250/ ×2
- https://search.worldcat.org/title/here-637306927 ×1
- https://www.pearson.com/en-gb/subject-catalog/p/continuous-delivery-reliable-software-releases-through-build-test-and-deployment-automation/P200000009113 ×1
- https://www.pearson.com/en-us/subject-catalog/p/continuous-delivery-reliable-software-releases-through-build-test-and-deployment-automation/P200000009113 ×1
- https://www.pearson.com/en-us/subject-catalog/p/continuous-delivery-reliable-software-releases-through-build-test-and-deployment-automation/P200000009113/9780321601919 ×1
- https://www.pearson.com/en-us/subject-catalog/p/continuous-delivery-reliable-software-releases-through-build-test-and-deployment-automation/P200000009113/9780321670229 ×1
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