How to Ensure Continuous Delivery

Overview

In this lesson, we'll study some practices that can support continuous delivery. These steps can prove beneficial when it comes to saving time and preventing the wasting of resources.

Merge small commits 

For this course, we prefer trunk-based development, where each developer does their part and merges their code into a single branch. This is the only route to continuous delivery. It requires a trustworthy team, feature flags, and a healthy suite of tests. Code should always be developed in small steps backed by tests. Don’t be afraid to write more test code than implementation.

Refactor ruthlessly 

Poorly named code can slow you down the next time you're working on a project. If you can make an API assumption explicit, it will be helpful in the future. For example, a recent ElasticSearch upgrade uncovered an index loader that required pairs of calls. Adjusting the client code to make this explicit will save time the next time the code is read.