# Continuous Delivery - Automating the Release Process

DevFeed: [Continuous Delivery - Automating the Release Process](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/continuous-delivery-automating-the-release-process-24950.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://codeahoy.com/2016/06/18/continuous-delivery-automating-the-release-process/>)

Author: umer

Published: 2016-06-18T00:00:00Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [Code Ahoy - Articles](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/code-ahoy-articles.md>)

Topics: [Continuous Delivery (CD)](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/continuous-delivery.md>), [Continuous integration](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/continuous-integration.md>), [Software Engineering](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/software-engineering.md>), [DevOps](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/devops.md>)

Tags: [automated](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/automated.md>), [ci](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ci.md>), [configuration](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/configuration.md>), [continuous-delivery](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/continuous-delivery.md>), [release](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/release.md>), [tests](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/tests.md>)

## AI overview

The article explains how manual release processes can be slow, error-prone, and stressful, then introduces Continuous Delivery as an approach for automating releases. It describes production-like environments, extensive automated testing, fast developer feedback, and Continuous Integration as a prerequisite.

## Source excerpt

For many software developers, release days are stressful events. There's always some risk that things might go wrong in the process or that a bug would surface in production. At my previous company, we had a manual release process that was very human intensive; hence, error prone. On release days, DevOps would load binaries on a staging environment and perform user acceptance tests (UAT) manually. If the tests were successful, the software was copied to production servers and verified with smoke tests and occasionally, a trimmed down version of the UAT was run again. Here are the common problems we faced: 2 out 3 times when we had to roll back a release because of an issue, it was due to a configuration mismatch between staging and production environments. The release process was slow and it took a long time to put new features in the hands of our users. It wasn't uncommon for the release process to take days or sometimes even weeks. The slow release process and the manual UAT had another side-effect: the developers didn't get timely feedback. By the time feedback arrived, they were often in the middle of another feature. This incurred additional overhead because their memories were no longer fresh and on rare occasions, the error got re-introduced due to mix-up between branches. In short, manual and ad-hoc release processes are suboptimal and the release day is fraught with stress. In our case, it was tolerable until releases became more frequent and the team grew. To improve and automate the release process, there's a software engineering approach know as Continuous Delivery (CD). Continuous delivery makes it possible to release new features quickly and reliably. It provides fast feedback to developers. The software is built in a way where it can be automatically and safely released to production at any time. This is ensured by delivering every change to a production-like environment and running extensive automated tests on it. According to Martin Fowler, you are