I've been involved with many projects that attempt to increase their delivery cadence after it has been deployed to production. This is met with severe resistance for multiple reasons; the manual testing effort takes too long, the environment is unstable, or it could result in downtime and customer impact. Since the business isn't asking for more frequent deliveries how can we justify the expense?
These reasons feel similar to the the resistance I receive when introducing test driven development. This got me thinking of an idea I've coined as "Operations First Delivery". The ideas is that the first delivery of a product should be a deployment to the production environment. This may seem ridiculous since nobody is using a non-existent product. I see that as a risk-free opportunity. This is the ideal time to release to production.
If we start every product were every changeset is deployed to production, we will start with Continuous Delivery. We will learn how to do zero-downtime deployments when it's appropriate. We will learn how to monitor our systems and resolve issues that generate support phone alerts. We will learn to evaluate and reduce risks in order to continuously deliver. This learning will be incremental and iterative from the beginning of the product.
