Reducing Software Release Pain by Releasing More Often

by Kief Morris

Our operations director put forward a counterintuitive suggestion -- rather than releasing less often, why not try releasing more often? Initially this seemed ridiculous. If our team wasn't capable of getting a release out in six months without running overschedule and overbudget, the idea of an even shorter release cycle seemed like a fantasy. But the operations director outlined his thinking, which was based on the concepts of Continuous Delivery. Over the rest of the year, we made some radical changes to the way we worked and saw some very practical benefits to delivering one or more software release(s) every month.