---
title: "Continuous Delivery Values"
url: "https://pipelinedriven.org/article/continuous-delivery-values.md"
canonical: "https://pipelinedriven.org/article/continuous-delivery-values"
published: "2017-03-10T21:33:29.052000+00:00"
updated: "2017-03-10T21:44:55.963000+00:00"
tags: []
author: "Roy Osherove"
description: "I mentioned in my last post about the toolchain needing to respect the continuous delivery values . What are those values? Many of them derive from lean…"
usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)."
license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
---

# Continuous Delivery Values

10 March 2017 · 1 min read · Roy Osherove

I mentioned [in my last post about the toolchain needing to respect the continuous delivery values](https://pipelinedriven.org/article/the-rules-of-selecting-tools-for-continuous-delivery-toolchains). What are those values? Many of them derive from lean thinking, eXtreme Programming ideas and the book "[Continuous Delivery](http://amzn.to/2nob369)".

Michael Wagner, a colleague and mentor of mine at Dell EMC,has described them as:

The core value is : 

## Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software

## The principles are:

- The process for releasing/deploying software MUST be repeatable and reliable
- Automate Everything down to bare metal
- If something’s difficult or painful, do it more often
- Keep EVERYTHING in source control
- Done means “released”
- Build quality in
- Everyone has responsibility for the release process
- Improve Continuously

## The Practices are:

- Build binaries (or image, or containers, or any artifact that will be deployed) only once, promote many
- Use precisely the same mechanism to deploy to every environment
- Smoke test your deployment
- Organizational policy is implemented as automated steps in the pipeline
- If anything fails, stop the line


---

## About the author

**Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery.

### Sites

- [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership.
- [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts.
- [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin.
- [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model.
- [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps.
- [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes).

### Social

- X: https://x.com/royosherove
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/

### Contact

- Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7

### License

Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/