The demand for new applications in today's digital era is uncompromisingly intense. As more and more companies look to transform their engagements with customers and keep up with the competition, IT developers are facing bigger workloads than ever.

Methods of application delivery have transformed

Over recent years, methods of application delivery have needed to change dramatically to meet production targets and market expectations. Conventional approaches are limited – quite often a developer will write code for an application, for example, and it won't get tested for three months.

Long lag times between an application's development and product feedback is a common problem with traditional methods.

Matt Mansell, chief strategy officer at IntegrationQA, says delays in the lifecyle cause all kinds of issues for everyone involved.

"When there is a defect in the code, they've got to go back and remind themselves what they did in order to fix it. That creates a lot of waste and rework in the lifecycle," Mr Mansell said.

"There is this idea that you can package up what you need for an application into a whole set of changes and then make and deliver them all at once. But if there's a problem, you have to investigate all the changes you made in order to find it. Whereas if you did all of those changes one at a time, you'll find out if there's a problem in that change and can fix it quickly and easily."

Mr Mansell used a production line analogy to illustrate his point:

Checking a batch of boxes moving down a production line one by one is a lot easier than waiting until they all get to the end and sifting through a huge pile to find out which ones have problems.

Embracing continuous delivery as a discipline

The 'fix it as you go approach', aka continuous delivery, is a far more effective way to develop and refine IT applications and keep them working in a way users want them to.

Umit Tacay, chief technology officer at ANATAS, said this method is being used by many websites and mobile applications.

"Your mobile apps are getting updated all the time – sometimes a few times weekly. You don't wait three years for one major update. Continuous delivery allows this type of approach where you can be quick to the market. You might not be first, but you can be quick. On top of that, you can fix your issues much more quickly," Mr Tacay said.

Continuous delivery is a discipline that requires a lot of change to the way people throughout an organisation work, he added.

"If you Google how to produce an app then attempt it, you might push out one project. But you are not going to build the discipline that's necessary to enable you to deliver continuously and that is the whole point of this exercise," said Mr Tacay.

Continuous delivery involves finding out how people are engaging with it, then using that feedback to adapt. The product can enter the market – perhaps even with some potentially desired functions absent at first – and evolve to fit the market needs. This is better than building a complex app with all kinds of fancy functions, only to subsequently realise that no one is interested in using them.

How ANATAS can help you continuously deliver

If you are interested to find out how your organisation can improve the efficiency and speed of its application delivery cycles, please contact ANATAS today. Our expert consultants would be glad to help get you started on the continuous delivery journey.

Next month, we'll explore the four steps to continuous development and positive organisational change.