The Highways and Country Roads to Continuous Deployment

As part of a Finnish research program, researchers interviewed 15 information and communications technology companies to determine the extent to which the companies adopted continuous deployment. They also aimed to find out why continuous deployment is considered beneficial and what the obstacles are to its full adoption. The benefits mentioned the most often were the ability to get faster feedback, the ability to deploy more often to keep customers satisfied, and improved quality and productivity. Despite understanding the benefits, none of the companies adopted a fully automatic deployment pipeline. The companies also had higher continuous-deployment capability than what they practiced. In many cases, they consciously chose to not aim for full continuous deployment. Obstacles to full adoption included domain-imposed restrictions, resistance to change, customer desires, and developers´ skill and confidence.