Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery and Automated Testing.

Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery and automated tests are instrumental in providing real value to users fast.

In this article, I will try to explain why.

The ideal Waterfall

Waterfall. In green how requirements grow in time and in orange how the team spends their time.

Apologies for the ink in the picture: there are days when being lefty feels less pleasant than others 😃

In waterfall, everything starts by creating a document containing all the requirements that are needed. That is why in the picture we have a vertical step at the start of the project: that will be the time when we will collect the project stakeholders and discuss what the software should do.

The development team will eventually be ready to produce a deliverable that will go through different stages aimed to ensure the release meets the highest standards of quality.

Some of these stages might be testing, bug fixing and deployment.

The real Waterfall

The curve in brown exemplifies how requirements can grow when the user is at the centre of the design.

The reality of Waterfall is that it can fail to deliver the product that is needed in the most efficient way.