Designing a Next-Generation Continuous Software Delivery System: Concepts and Architecture

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery are established practices in modern agile software development. The DevOps movement adapted theses practices and places the deployment pipeline at its heart as one of the main requirements to automate the software development process and to deliver and operate software in a more robust way with higher quality. Over the time a lot of systems and tools has been developed to implement the deployment pipeline and to support continuous delivery. But software development is complex, its process even more and due to the individual organization of software vendors no real all-in-one solution for CD exists. Literature identified a lot of challenges when adopting CD and DevOps in an organization. This paper presents a conceptual model and fundamental design decisions for a new generation of software delivery systems tackling some of these issues. Our approach focuses on two specific challenges for adopting CD. The first is the lack of flexibility and maintainability of software delivery systems. The second is the insufficient user support to model and manage delivery processes and pipelines. We introduce an automated mechanism to ease the effort for developers and other stakeholders. Based on these results this paper introduces an architectural proposal for a next-generation continuous software delivery system.