A Basic Continuous Delivery Pipeline for Embedded HMIs
Continuous Delivery is achieved by working so that our software is always in a releasable state.
Dave Farley, Continuous Delivery Pipelines - How to Build Better Software Faster, p. 5
A Continuous Delivery (CD) pipeline tells you when your software is not in a releasable state. The CD pipeline for embedded HMIs is divided into three stages: the Commit Stage, the Acceptance Stage and the System Stage. The Commit Stage takes less than 5 minutes, the Acceptance Stage less than 1 hour and the System Stage less than 3 hours to decide whether the software is releasable. You should strive to halve the running times of the three stages.
Continuous delivery is all about getting fast and frequent feedback for all our activities. That’s why it works. The earlier we get feedback the quicker we can fix problems and the less rework we will have.
Burkhard Stubert, The Key Principles of Continuous Delivery
The CD pipeline is the engine for Continuous Delivery. It tells you quickly that something is wrong with your software and gives you a good idea where this “something” is. In Farley’s words, a CD pipeline is a “falsification machine”. The throughput metrics (deployment frequency and lead time for changes) tell you how you are doing.