I’ve read a lot about the positive impact of removing handoffs between product development and operations (DevOps, software delivery performance). An important practice here is continuous delivery (code gets pushed to production often and in small batches). What I’m struggling to wrap my head around is how the concept of continuous delivery might apply to my situation. We make banking software. The company consists of a R&D organisation and a professional services (PS) organisation. R&D creates a product, PS takes the product and runs projects where they use the product to build a specific solution meeting a customer’s requirements. Projects usually take months. I work in the R&D organisation. For us, “releasing” means putting our code artefacts in a public repository once a month. But putting code artefacts on a public repository once a month is a far cry from software running in production. So my question is: if we don’t have “software running in production”, how do we do continuous delivery?

I’ve read a lot about the positive impact of removing handoffs between product development and operations (DevOps, software delivery performance). An important practice here is continuous delivery (code gets pushed to production often and in small batches). What I’m struggling to wrap my head around is how the concept of continuous delivery might apply to my situation. We make banking software. The company consists of a R&D organisation and a professional services (PS) organisation. R&D creates a product, PS takes the product and runs projects where they use the product to build a specific solution meeting a customer’s requirements. Projects usually take months. I work in the R&D organisation. For us, “releasing” means putting our code artefacts in a public repository once a month. But putting code artefacts on a public repository once a month is a far cry from software running in production. So my question is: if we don’t have “software running in production”, how do we do continuous delivery?