Toward a Reference Model for Adopting Software Continuous Delivery: A Practical Approach

Salem S.Bahamdain and Basem Y. Alkazemi

Releasing a new version of a software system is a relatively complex process that requires lengthy and complicated preparation and coordination between different role-players of the development and operation teams. The difficulty originates during the early stages of gathering requirements and continues to the stages of software deployment and maintenance. Enhancing the software development process and overcoming some of the obstacles encountered by developers can be achieved through the utilization of continuous delivery (CD) practices. This analytical study investigated the currently available CD implementations in industry to identify the key characteristics of CD from a practical perspective and to evaluate them based on the commonly defined characteristics in the literature. A number of solutions were examined and a taxonomy that highlighted the similarity and variations in every solution was generated. Subsequently, a discussion of the requirements needed for a CD reference model was presented, which represents the key contribution of this work. The proposed analytical framework was evaluated in terms of a taxonomy that was generated in this work. The key characteristics of a CD model were highlighted at both the conceptual and implementation levels in light of the currently available technologies and the overall results obtained favored the assertion made in this work regarding the essence of generating a standard reference model for CD. The experiment also identified the common underlying components of a CD model, which were believed to be essentially the building blocks for the successful implementation of a CD model. The model proposed in this work may act as a baseline for defining a reference model for CD in practice. Software development organizations can refer to this model for the implementation of their underlying delivery pipelines. This model was investigated thoroughly in the context of web-portal development environments.

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