What Is Progressive Delivery All About?

Progressive Delivery is a modern software development lifecycle that builds upon the core tenets of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD). It enables organizations to ship code faster, reduce risk, and continuously improve the customer experience. Key enablers of Progressive Delivery include feature management, dark launches, feature flagging, testing in production, canary launches, blue-green deployments, A/B testing, and more. The origins of Progressive Delivery can be traced back to Microsoft's "Progressive Experimentation" model for feature rollouts. Core tenets include control over which users see which features, timing of deployment versus release, and who is allowed to release features. Deployment rings at Microsoft and "staff ships" and canary deployments at GitHub are examples of how these principles are put into practice. Progressive Delivery also plays a crucial role in enabling DevOps transformation by increasing deployment speeds, system stability, and cross-team collaboration.