What is continuous development?

Continuous software development is a broad term that encompasses a range of Agile principles, including CI/CD, that are an alternative to Waterfall development methods. As such, it brings with it several Agile-related advantages. Some of the most prominent benefits of continuous development include the following:

They say that no strategy survives contact with the enemy, and this military aphorism may be adapted to software delivery; you can do as much testing and revising as you’d like, but often the test that really shows where improvements are needed is the test performed by the end user. Continuous deployment allows organizations to easily pivot, update, improve, and perform course corrections on applications after they’ve landed in the hands of the customer. This means that you can continue to improve your software quality, until it reaches its best possible form.

Bug-free software applications are the dream of every development team. And with continuous development, that dream can become closer to reality. By not limiting updates to pre-deployment cycles or the occasional large-batch update, continuous development makes it easier to run tests, incorporate feedback, and identify and remediate errors. Updates can be performed at any time, without the hassle of having to go through with a large-scale release.

A vital aspect of DevOps and Agile is automation. Similarly, automation plays a key role in continuous development, making it possible for any ongoing changes or improvements to be automatically bug tested and uploaded, without forcing developers to handle these tasks manually. The result is the ability to free up experienced teams from repetitive, time-consuming responsibilities, and instead allow them to devote their efforts to more-strategic concerns. Even in highly regulated environments, it is now possible to automate governance processes to ensure audit and regulatory compliance during continuous delivery.

Releasing a large batch of software updates carries with it inherent risk — if there’s a defect, it can be extremely difficult to identify and isolate from among all the other changes and sending the entire application back for further maintenance takes a lot of time. Incremental development makes it much easier to validate changes, one at a time, minimizing the impact on other development tasks within the project.

Better quality, reduced risk, improved productivity, and the other advantages of continuous development all lead back to one major benefit: reduced spend. As developers can do more with less, and as organizations enjoy reduced development cycles and easier maintenance, the overall cost of delivering a project that meets users' needs decreases. That means a greater ROI for software development.

At its core, continuous development accelerates software development. This allows development teams to accomplish more in less time and gives customers faster access to applications that are more routinely improved through ongoing updates. More specifically, the importance of continuous development is tied to the following:

It can be difficult for developers to step away from a project, only to be drawn back into it days, weeks, or even months later. Continuous development is essentially continuous feedback; developers can gather and respond to feedback in near-real time, making slight corrections where necessary, and continuing their work on specific projects while the details are still fresh in their minds.

Employing automated testing not only takes some responsibilities off of the developers’ plates, it also makes it possible to quickly and accurately identify bugs, vulnerabilities, defects, and errors. Developers can then address these issues as they arise, eliminating problems within the code before they can compound into something more damaging.

In DevOps, quality gates are checks of code integrity. If the code doesn’t meet a certain, predefined threshold of quality standards, then the gate may halt, or even fail, a build. Gates may be set up to ensure that every project meets certain criteria, not only for quality of code, but also for security and other factors. Continuous development, when combined with the right automation solutions, empowers teams to enforce quality gates and automatically deliver all coding changes for inspection and validation. Quality gates can become a part of a broader governance strategy that integrates with other systems to retain compliance.

The traditional Waterfall approach generally takes the form of a kind of assembly line, with team members doing their part, and then sending the project on to the next person in the sequence. Continuous development, on the other hand, keeps developers involved throughout the entire production cycle. This means more ownership in the final project, for a “you wrote it; you own it” culture based on vital DevOps principles.