Timothy Fitz [1] started a discussion about continuous deployment that I really like. He describes the day to day problems of software development teams and believes the solution is continuous deployment. And I completely agree. Then I found a very interesting post written by Laura Klein [2] about the problems of continuous deployment from the perspective of the users.

“I worked with a software development organization that practiced continuous deployment on a very large, complicated code base, and I can definitely say, the engineers loved it. From the point of view of the employees, continuous deployment was a giant win.” [2] And then she asked: “But how was it for the users?[...] and believes we need always consider this question too ” how might this affect my customers, and how can I make it work best for them?” Again I would agree. So I want to summarize what we need to consider if we do want to make continuous deployment:

Good:

• Bugs gets fixed immediately and the user benefits from this
  
• Small tweaks will make the user faster happy
• You can react much faster on the feedback of you user base. This creates a community feeling.

• Always only release tested and ready software
• Do not implement disruptive interface changes. Migrate slowly into the new direction
• Make sure your UI looks similar, and the user will be able to use the new feature easily
• Put you QA into the team
• Make sure also your documentation gets updated continuously.
• Add new things to your help screens etc