Summary

  • 2 minutes

Your organization supports a critical business application deployed across the globe in multiple regions. The application has multiple modules, including a mobile app available on the most popular mobile app stores. The estimated downtime cost of the platform is calculated in 10,000 USD per minute. Found bugs must be quickly resolved and brought into production with no downtime.

Continuous Quality will enable your team to elevate the global quality of the application. Continuous Delivery will enable automated propagation of new versions through the multiple environments.

Continuous Delivery is a software engineering approach in which teams produce software in short cycles. Its purpose is to:

  • Build, test, and release software with greater speed and frequency.
  • Reduce the cost, time, and risk of delivering changes by allowing for more incremental updates to applications in production.

By automating the process and enabling the ability to release to production at any time, Continuous Delivery brings important benefits such as:

  • Less waste
  • Faster ROI
  • Lower risk
  • Higher quality

Continuous Quality is about fostering a quality culture. It helps teams create superior user experiences, build features that fit the market’s timing, and enable the characteristics of an application that deliver value faster than they create technical debt.

Involving a shift from the traditional quality assurance paradigm, Continuous Quality isn't free of challenges and risks:

  • Organizational silos can impede adoption rates.
  • Continuous Quality requires engaging all stakeholders and empowering them to push back.
  • Using Continuous Quality in software development requires changes to role responsibilities and changing organizational culture. Such changes will cause a decrease in productivity before reaching expert levels.
  • Although tools automate and facilitate processes, Continuous Quality requires organizational culture to change.
  • If Continuous Quality remains only technically focused around continuous integration and testing, your organization will not realize the benefits it hoped for.
  • A narrow focus on a single quality metric can drive employees to improve the metric at the expense of other corporate goals, or even customer satisfaction. If an organization doesn’t know what Continuous Quality means for them, they could experience multiple false starts while figuring it out.

But in addition to fostering a quality culture, Continuous Quality is also about mindset – a passion to learn and bring our best every day to make a bigger difference in the world.