Much has been said lately of continuous delivery. It does sound appealing, but runs against the grain of convention wisdom in big corporations.
- Jez Humble - Continuous Delivery
- Thoughtworks Presentation - Continuous Delivery - Part 1
- Thoughtworks Presentation - Continuous Delivery - Part 2
Assuming the following:
- You have a number of remote systems connected via ESB
- You have an established system with several years of coding changes applied to it
- This is a website that allows financial transactions
- There are multiple backend systems responsible for processing different types of transactions
- Currently production releases assume a multi $10K investment in a manual regression test
Can Continuous Delivery be implemented in such an environment? (ie is the underlying assumption behind Continuous Delivery that you invest a large amount in automated regression testing that is coordinated across systems?)
(Surely automated unit tests can prove a system is not incorrect, but can't prove it is correct).