We hear a lot about the potential beneifts of Continuous Deployment, which usually focus on faster feedback cycles and shorter delivery timeframes.

While these can be great benefits, there’s another benefit that I think gets far too little attention, and that is the psychological change that developers feel when they know that their code will be live within minutes of hitting that Merge button.

Speaking for myself (but confirmed independently by many other devs I’ve spoken to), when I know there’s a delay between hitting Merge, and my changes appearing live in front of customers, I tend to put less weight into the decision of when or if to hit Merge.

To a degree this can make intuitive sense if there are additional manual checks that happen (such as a manual QA stage) after hitting merge. But even when there is no additional checking, the psychological weight feels lower when there’s a delay.

This is one of the biggest advantages of implementing CD, even when using manual QA or other manual gatekeeping steps, as I advocate in my Lean CD approach. But making Merge synonymous with Go live to the customer, we can put the onus on the developer for quality. Even with no other changes, this will give each developer a bit stronger feeling of responsibility and ownership, and I have seen it result in an observable improvement in the quality of the end product.