Communication of Changes in Continuous Software Development

Abstract

The industry competition has changed the way software is managed, developed, and delivered over the years. Some of the approaches that emerged to continuously deliver software to users are Continuous Delivery (CDE) and Continuous Deployment (CD). CDE is the ability to get software functionalities, of any kind, into the hands of users, in small batches, and short cycles. In CD, every change that passes all stages of the production pipeline is released to customers without human intervention. The agility proposed by the Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment approaches may introduce some challenges to the software development life-cycle. Some of these challenges are related to the Software Configuration Management process and the communication of software changes to relevant stakeholders such as operations teams. In order to better understand which communication practices are used to communicate software changes in environments where Continuous Delivery or Continuous Deployment were adopted, a systematic literature review and an empirical study with global companies were performed, which allowed us to consolidate a collection of communication practices for communicating software changes that could benefit companies that already adopted or are planning to implement continuous software delivery practices.