With today’s pressures to quickly deliver software to the market while maintaining high quality, organizations have been embracing optimization tactics like Continuous Delivery to speed up release cycles.

“Companies can no longer afford to wait until the end of long development and release cycles to find out if they’re keeping up with market demands,” said Christopher Seiwald, founder and CEO of Perforce Software.

(Related: The right way and wrong way to do rollbacks with Continuous Delivery)

Continuous Delivery is designed to not only speed up the software delivery process, but also to improve and automate it. It can be very successful when the right principles are adopted. Perforce has provided what it believes are the five best practices in achieving Continuous Delivery success:

Think beyond the code. All components of a product need to be constantly versioned from development to deployment, not just the code. Otherwise, incomplete or inconsistent applications get released out into the market.

Automate. Organizations need to do less manual activity and more automation. In an automated environment, code can be almost immediately tested for integration into a delivery package, and if a failure occurs, the development team can then instantly correct it. This ensures a high level of efficiency.

Make everything fully visible. Visibility allows for collaboration across all teams and projects. “What comes out of broad visibility is the opportunity to learn from others in the organization based on their contributions, and the ability to leverage the collective wisdom and output of the group to advance quality and capabilities,” according to Perforce.

Track every change. Traceability keeps track of all assets and identifies who “owns” each one. Recording everything can be very useful in situations where a rollback to an existing version is necessary. Also, alerting history should be prohibited.

Put it all in one place. A unified version-control platform enables the ability to roll back important changes if needed, allows teams to work in tighter loops, and streamlines siloes from end to end. Any versioning platform should include scalability, universal adoption and security.

More information on Perforce’s best practices is available here.