Book review: Continuous Delivery

I recently finished reading Continuous Delivery by Jez Humble and David Farley. I have to say that the book was quite exiting. The first parts showed how to implement a continuous delivery pipeline and where automated tests fit in. It also explained how to setup the automated tests and the importance of continuously testing your applications.

The book however lost some of it’s flare at the end. The last chapters describing how to divide your application into components, manage continuous delivery and source control didn’t quite live up to the same quality earlier in the book. These chapters were a bit vague and repeated points made in earlier chapters.

I still recommend reading this book. To be honest I think this book gave me a better picture of how to fit acceptance tests into development than for example the Agile Testing book gave me. The more hands on practical approach to Continuous Delivery gives the option of first setting up the development environment to support acceptance tests, and then add the tests.

This being said the book was so inspiring that I  started a template project to implement a continuous delivery pipeline using Hudson and Git. You can find it as a project on github. We’re adopting this template to be used at RemoteX.

I recommend this book to any team that wants to improve their build and delivery models.