Continuous Delivery: Overcoming adoption challenges

Continuous Delivery (CD) is a relatively new software development approach. Companies that have adopted CD have reported significant benefits. Motivated by these benefits, many companies would like to adopt CD. However, adopting CD can be very challenging for a number of reasons, such as obtaining buy-in from a wide range of stakeholders whose goals may seemingly be different from or even conflict with our own; gaining sustained support in a dynamic complex enterprise environment; maintaining an application development team's momentum when their application's migration to CD requires an additional strenuous effort over a long period of time; and so on. To help overcome the adoption challenges, I present six strategies: (1) selling CD as a painkiller; (2) establishing a dedicated team with multi-disciplinary members; (3) continuous delivery of continuous delivery; (4) starting with the easy but important applications; (5) visual CD pipeline skeleton; (6) expert drop. These strategies were derived from four years of experience in implementing CD at a multi-billion-euro company. Additionally, our experience led to the identification of eight further challenges for research. The information contributes toward building a body of knowledge for CD adoption. (C) 2017 The Author. Published by Elsevier Inc.