I wanted to expand a bit on what I wrote yesterday about what necessary components you need in place to achieve the benefits of continuous delivery.

Fortunately, a group of people with a lot broader experience than I have, have put their heads together and come up with a pretty good definition of “Minimum Viable Continuous Delivery” which is hosted at minimumcd.org. Let me share the highlights:

The minimum activities required for CD are:

• Use Continuous integration
• The application pipeline is the only way to deploy to any environment.
• The pipeline decides the releasability of changes, its verdict is definitive
• Artifacts created by the pipeline always meet the organization’s definition of deployable
• Immutable artifact. No human changes after commit.
• All feature work stops when the pipeline is red
• Production-like test environment
• Rollback on-demand
• Application configuration deploys with artifact

There’s more to read on the site about Continuous Integration and Trunk-based development respectively, so I encourage you to read the entire page (it’s short).

I also interviewed Bryan Finster, one of the original authors of Minimum Viable CD, on the topic in Episode #21, in case you missed it.