On continuous deployment maturity in customer projects
Antti Virtanen, Kati Kuusinen, Marko Leppänen, Antti Luoto, Terhi Kilamo, Tommi Mikkonen · 2017
The practice of making new software available to end users as soon as it gets implemented is becoming commonplace. This paper investigates a set of projects and their development practices in a mid-sized Finnish software company Solita Ltd. to understand how continuous deployment practices are applied in development teams. This was done by establishing a maturity scale and using it to survey the teams. In addition, we interviewed members of selected teams to understand why a particular level of maturity is desirable for a project, and to reveal the issues that impact team's ability to improve. We found that while the team, the customer, and the product all benefit from mature development practices associated with continuous deployment, some obstacles can be solved only by changing the organizational modus operandi.