White Papers

Deployment Automation Basics

With increased release pace, and more agility in development, there's been a push for more and more automation in the deployment area. Yet, many deployment teams see deployment automation as risky and unproven.

Why should we bother automating deployments in the first place? Are manual deployment practices really that bad? How do we manage the risks of automating? What should the scope of the automation effort be? How do we get started? This white paper provides a solid introduction to these topics.

Build and Deployment Automation for the Lean Economy

In good economic times teams attempt bold experiments that promise to take them to new heights of productivity. In lean times like these, few have the appetite for such speculative ventures. Any new investment needs to address immediate pain and show immediate payback.

This white paper introduces and applies the Lean techniques of value stream mapping and spaghetti diagramming to software build, test and deployment. With these techniques we can quantify improvements and prove payback. Anyone interested in Lean, automation, or ROI determination should read this paper.

Enterprise Continuous Delivery Maturity Model

How mature are your Continuous Integration, Continuous Deliivery and Release practices? Where can you get the most improvement based on your specific problems and needs? How are other organizations solving these same problems?

In recent years the role of automation in software development has expanded dramatically - particularly where Agile has taken hold. But despite these benefits the adoption of automation has been uneven. Many software teams struggle with manual, slow, high-risk deployments. Others use release processes that are efficient and safe enough to deploy to production many times a day. There are many paths to improving your development automation efforts, but where to start? This guide can help you answer these questions.

Continuous Integration and Build Management Server Evaluation Guide

This paper is organized around three feature sets that we typically see in evaluation scenarios. The first feature set focuses on Continuous Integration and provides some of the basic functionality required for an implementation of either Continuous Integration and/or Build Management. In this way, the Continuous Integration feature set lays the foundation for the Build Management feature set that follows.

Drawing the Line: Continuous Integration and Build Management

This paper seeks to get at the true nature of Continuous Integration and Build Management by decomposing each practice into its constituent elements and examining the repercussions thereof.