Toward Design Decisions to Enable Deployability: Empirical Study of Three Projects Reaching for the Continuous Delivery Holy Grail

There is growing interest in continuous delivery practices to enable rapid and reliable deployment. While practices are important, we suggest architectural design decisions are equally important for projects to achieve goals such continuous integration (CI) build, automated testing and reduced deployment-cycle time. Architectural design decisions that conflict with deploy ability goals can impede the team's ability to achieve the desired state of deployment and may result in substantial technical debt. To explore this assertion, we interviewed three project teams striving to practicing continuous delivery. In this paper, we summarize examples of the deploy ability goals for each project as well as the architectural decisions that they have made to enable deploy ability. We present the deploy ability goals, design decisions, and deploy ability tactics collected and summarize the design tactics derived from the interviews in the form of an initial draft version hierarchical deploy ability tactic tree.