5 Steps to Getting to Continuous Deployment
You don’t just do continuous deployment; you live it. Everything your team does aligns with it. It has to be part of your culture, but it can’t happen by default; it has to be by design.
Shipping software is the real goal of development. If users can’t access it, what’s the point? Whether you’re a startup, a small business, or a legacy-packed enterprise, smooth deployment requires company-wide commitment to Continuous Deployment. Too many teams struggle because they neglect the right people, processes, and culture. But those who invest in making deployment easy can quickly adapt, fix issues, and keep their developers happy.
Here are five steps to help your team get to continuous deployment.
1. State it as a goal and talk about it constantly
Align it with a team or company value.
Discuss CD in every meeting, from architecture reviews to sprint planning. Ask how to automate processes and implement feature flags. Address questions about implementation as they arise.
CD requires cultural change and company-wide buy-in. Align it with existing company values to help others understand its importance. Address concerns about stability with automated testing and feature flags. For infrastructure issues, invest in pipeline improvements.
Engage stakeholders early - from tech leads to business owners. In large enterprises, this may take months or years. Consider joining digital transformation initiatives to drive change.
Demonstrate CD's value to all stakeholders: quick issue resolution for product managers, rapid business adaptation for owners, and better user experience overall. While some may doubt its feasibility, broad support will ease the transition.
To begin the CD journey, set the vision, discuss it consistently, and align with company values. The real work follows these initial steps.
With these steps, teams have gone from deploying once every three months to multiple times per day, from being leery of continuous deployment to making it part of their work. You, too, can do CD. You have to make it part of the culture.
2. Start with continuous delivery
Deploy once a week, then twice, then daily.
Continuous delivery differs from continuous deployment in that CD requires manual action to go live, while continuous deployment happens automatically after code approval, merging, building and testing.
Starting with continuous delivery helps teams develop a rhythm of frequent, automated code delivery. Your systems need guardrails to prevent bugs from reaching production. While this transition may cause initial issues, each mistake provides learning opportunities.
Key steps:
Automate everything from builds to deployment
Implement rollback capabilities
Eliminate breaking changes in databases and APIs
Monitor DORA metrics, especially deployment frequency and lead time
Gradually increase release frequency to daily
3. Fix what is preventing continuous deployment
Whether it’s a slow build pipeline, flaky tests, or a hard-to-manage local development environment, invest in your team’s workflow and do whatever it takes to remove the barriers to continuous deployment.
Developers often complain about productivity issues they feel are beyond their control, such as flaky tests, slow builds, and problematic development environments.
While these concerns are valid, they're within your team's control. Don't let the rush for new features prevent you from fixing underlying issues.
If your team feels powerless, work alongside them. Take on a minor bug fix yourself to experience their challenges firsthand. Then, give them time to address these problems - fix tests, upgrade build servers, and improve development environments.
Track your DORA metrics, analyze build times and test failures, and use your development environment regularly. Bring these insights to retrospectives to identify bottlenecks and celebrate progress. Once these improvements are in place, implement continuous delivery.
4. Collect DORA metrics and show them at every meeting
Collecting DORA metrics indicates good development practices.
Start with Deployment Frequency - track successful deployments in your CD pipeline. This metric serves as an early warning system for process issues.
Lead Time for Change measures how long it takes for completed code to reach production. Extract this data from version control, focusing on the time from the first commit to deployment. This reveals process bottlenecks.
Change Failure Rate tracks the percentage of problematic deployments. Define what constitutes a production failure, whether it's crashes, service outages, or SLA breaches. This requires collaboration with operations and support teams.
Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) measures how quickly you recover from failures. Define both failure and recovery criteria clearly. This metric pairs closely with Change Failure Rate.
Share these metrics in every meeting, having team members explain them to build understanding. Remember: They measure processes, not people. It's your responsibility to improve them.
Use these metrics to set goals and evaluate process changes, creating a clear improvement path.
5. Engage with the rest of the company
Tell everyone you can that “we release to production multiple times a day.”
While most teams deploy code weekly, monthly, or quarterly, you're now set up for multiple daily deployments. You've built an automated, trustworthy process that sets you apart from other engineering teams - something worth sharing across the company.
Frequent deployments mean faster bug fixes, better security responses, and the ability to use advanced features like Feature Flags. For your team, this brings an efficient build pipeline, reliable tests, and improved collaboration through quick feedback cycles.
With these steps, teams have gone from deploying once every three months to multiple times per day, from being leery of continuous deployment to making it part of their work. You, too, can do CD. You have to make it part of the culture.