Software Realm: The Real Continuous Delivery (CD) eats CI/CD for the breakfast

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Software as a derivation from calculation, has been considered luxury for a long time. It has been mainly moved forward by highly talented software developers who could imagine and transform problem statements into programming objects and relations which had no similarity to the original problem's context. From an outsider perspective, the software developer's work would be a kind of mysterious and witchcraft. Therefore, the focus of businesses have been mostly on the steps right after the development, i.e., Integration and Delivery. And when they wanted to increase the pace, Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) were the obvious options leading to the successful CI/CD implementations.

In recent years, however, the software development benefited from many giants (advanced libraries, managed services/APIs, engines, etc.) that do a lot of heavylifting. This allowed the developers to express the problem statement and therefore the proposed solution (idea) in nonspecialized terms. With this higher level of visibility in the development part, we need to revisit of the whole journey, especially the CI/CD part.

The whole journey from the receiving the problem statement to the delivery of the solution should be considered the new Delivery Journey. This means that a high paced execution of this whole delivery journey will be the new Continuous Delivery (CD). In this context, the old CD would need to be replaced by something more specific such as Continuous Last-Mile Delivery, or C(LM)D. The main part of this new CD would be the first, i.e., where developers express the problem statement and develop the solution to it. Let's call this Continuous Development: CD(EV). There would be one or more parts between CD(EV) and CI which challenge the solution before it goes out the gates.

The main advantage of CD as a whole journey from CD(EV) to C(LM)D is that the delivery tempo is no more an arbitrary and artificial tempo set by the operators of CI/CD. Instead, ignoring the constraints [1], it is the main actors, the software developers, who set the heartbeat and tempo beating out of CD(EV) and flowing through the rest of the journey.

Just a thought.

[1] - Software Realm: What is the Minimum Viable Change (MVC) in Continuous Delivery? https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/software-realm-what-minimum-viable-change-mvc-reza-nnmae

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