Over the past couple of weeks my team and I have been getting our heads into the nuts and bolts of what we need to do to improve our process around continuously delivering code to our users. We’ve been looking at our contribution process, how we pair when making changes to our codebase, how we might use preview environments for quicker user testing, where feature toggles allow us to ship incomplete code to production in a safe way, and how we have confidence in how our application performs once it’s in the real world.

All of this is typically excites us as engineers, but the value isn’t always clear to our stakeholders. Beyond the practicalities of how we might evolve our process, we’ve spent a good amount of time discussing what will actually add real value, and whether it’s possible to incrementally practice continuous delivery and start having an impact sooner.

There is a lot more to think about here, but a comment from one of my colleagues stuck with me this week, as they reminded me of the value of decoupling deployment and releasing as a way to reduce risk. 

I had a few days off last week (hence the short break in my weeknotes!). It was lovely to disconnect and head to the Welsh coast.