The document discusses continuous deployment, which is the practice of automatically deploying code changes to production after passing automated tests. It explains that continuous deployment allows teams to ship features faster, validate assumptions more quickly, and minimize risks of each deployment. It outlines three criteria for successful continuous deployment: infrastructure like continuous integration servers and monitoring; a collaborative culture that removes barriers to code reviews; and continuous testing from unit to UI levels with production monitoring and rollbacks. The presentation takes questions on continuous deployment practices.

1. Getting to
Continuous Deployment
Kevin Bell
Developer Evangelist
Fred Stevens-Smith
CEO & Co-Founder

2. #continuousdeployment
Agenda
● What is CD and why do it?
● Infrastructure
● Culture
● Testing
● Q&A

3. #continuousdeployment
What is Continuous Deployment?
Code
Development
Continuous
Integration
Staging Production
Continuous
Deployment
Continuous deployment is the Agile philosophy expanded to deployment.
Every change that passes the automated tests is deployed to production
automatically.
(tl;dr: deploy code in smaller chunks, more frequently)

4. #continuousdeployment
Why do Continuous Deployment?
- Ship features to users more quickly
- Experiment and validate assumptions more rapidly
- Be more responsive to unforeseen problems
- Minimize the risk of each deployment*
- Keeps your agile process honest:
- “But we are Agile! We use user stories and have sprints!”
- Many teams have agile process without agile technology
- CD requires both
*But be careful about “switching on” large features

5. #continuousdeployment
3 Criteria for Successful Continuous Deployment
Infrastructure
What tools do
you need?
Culture Testing
Do you have checks &
balances?
How comprehensive is
your testing?

6. #continuousdeployment
Criteria #1: Infrastructure Basics
Continuous
Integration
(CI) Servers
Version Control
Unit +
Integration
Testing
Monitoring

7. #continuousdeployment
Criteria #2: Culture of Collaboration
● Trust your team
● Remove red tape in the code review process
● Involve developers closely in production
operations
● Review pull requests (re: sanity checks)
83% of SaaS companies
with a high CD adoption
rate report that using a
collaboration platform
played a highly important
role in achieving CD. *
* 2015 Evans Research Survey of Software Development Professionals

8. #continuousdeployment
Criteria #3: Test Continuously
Test as early & often as possible
● Unit tests
● UI tests (automated vs. manual)
Production monitoring + Rollbacks
Zenefits was able to scale their
customer base to 10,000+
without an in-house QA team
by supplementing their testing
automation suites with manual
testing.

9. #continuousdeployment
But wait! Other things to consider…..
Zero downtime deployments
Feature Flags
Gradual roll-outs

10. Questions?
Kevin Bell
Developer Evangelist
Fred Stevens-Smith
CEO & Co-Founder

11. Thank you!