Continuous delivery, as a process, aims to help developers generate deployment-ready code as quickly and efficiently as possible. By facilitating short development cycles with automation, workflows, and more, continuous delivery solutions enable developers to build and execute delivery pipelines to stage software and updates. Some continuous delivery solutions allow for continuous deployment, which automatically pushes deployment-ready code to production. Otherwise, deployment is manual.
Alongside short development cycles, continuous delivery tools contribute to time and cost savings for development teams. Continuous delivery solutions also enable a stronger, more robust feedback cycle, which can strengthen a business’ final product. These tools offer more visibility into the development cycle, helping team leads, product managers, and management receive better insight and analytics on development progress and success.
Continuous delivery software extend beyond the functionalities of continuous integration tools up to the point of being deployment ready.
To qualify for inclusion in the Continuous Delivery category, a product must:
Connect to code repositories
Generate a software build
Help teams define and execute their processes from coding to staging
Automatically deploy code or maintain code in a deployment-ready state