Showstoppers for Continuous Delivery in Small Scale Projects

Abstract: Small scale projects outsourced to consultants provide their own difficulties when compared to more standard software development. Some of these problems are a lack of infrastructure and customers inexperienced with software development. This thesis is looking at the possibility of implementing continuous delivery in such an environment. The concrete problems are small projects with very little room for experimentation. But also the inexperience in automated testing which is essential for efficient regression testing. This led this thesis in two directions. The first one is how can you create a situation where continuous delivery could be beneficial, where developers prefer writing automated test cases instead of performing Ad Hoc manual testing during development and relying on a larger testing phase towards the end, much like what is done in waterfall development. The solution is to perform more deliveries to the customer throughout the project, with the customer having the responsibility of providing feedback on these deliveries. For the developers to embrace automated testing, a shift in focus is needed, from functional testing through the GUI to smaller unit and integration tests that will be easier to write and maintain. The other direction is addressing the fact that there is very little to continuously deliver during early stages of development, which could essentially make up half the project length. But also that there are several small projects each year. Making configuration management a support function for projects allows for standardisation and sharing the cost between all the projects.