This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Summary
The purpose of the deployment pipeline is to give everyone involved in delivering software visibility into the progress of builds from check-in to release. It should be possible to see which changes have broken the application and which resulted in release candidates suitable for manual testing or release. Your implementation should make it possible to perform push-button deployments into manual testing environments, and to see which release candidates are in those environments. Choosing to release a particular version of your application should also be a push-button task that can be performed with full knowledge that the release candidate being deployed has passed the entire pipeline successfully, and hence has had a battery of automated and manual tests performed on it in a production-like environment.
Once you have a deployment pipeline implemented, inefficiencies in your release process will become obvious. All kinds of useful information can be derived from a working deployment pipeline, such as how long it takes a release candidate to get through the various manual testing stages, the average cycle time from check-in to release, and how many defects are discovered at which stages in your process. Once you have this information, you can work to optimize your process for building and releasing software.
There is no one-size-fits-all solution to the complex problem of implementing a deployment pipeline. The crucial point is to create a system of record that manages each change from check-in to release, providing the information you need to discover problems as early as possible in the process. Having an implementation of the deployment pipeline can then be used to drive out inefficiencies in your process so you can make your feedback cycle faster and more powerful, perhaps by adding more automated acceptance tests and parallelizing them more aggressively, or by making your testing environments more production-like, or by implementing better configuration management processes.
A deployment pipeline, in turn, depends on having some foundations in place: good configuration management, automated scripts for building and deploying your application, and automated tests to prove that your application will deliver value to its users. It also requires discipline, such as ensuring that only changes that have passed through the automated build, test, and deployment system get released. We discuss these prerequisites and the necessary disciplines in Chapter 15, "Managing Continuous Delivery," which includes a maturity model for continuous integration, testing, data management, and so forth.
The following chapters of the book dive into considerably more detail on implementing deployment pipelines, exploring some of the common issues that may arise and discussing techniques that can be adopted within the context of the full lifecycle deployment pipelines described here.