Perceived Benefits of Adopting Continuous Delivery Practices

Context: In continuous delivery, the aim is that every feature passes through the integration and deployment pipeline, resulting in an immediately deployable product. This practice has been proposed to accelerate value delivery, improve software quality and increase developer productivity. Goal: We investigate the adoption of continuous delivery practices and evaluate the related benefits in a single customer-supplier organization. We focus on the perceived benefits of supplier and customer organizations during a five-year transition period. Method: We performed an exploratory case study. We used semi-structured interviews and thematic analysis. Results: Increased communication and collaboration between developers and customer was perceived as one of the core benefits. Other reported benefits were increased productivity, improved product quality, improved developer morale as well as infrastructural independence and organizational agnosticism. Conclusions: The results indicate that the adoption of continuous software engineering practices bring various benefits for both customers and developers, beyond mere increased pace of production deployments.