Ancestry.com's top lessons learned from continuous software development

A healthy Continuous Delivery system should be highly automated, with testing to ensure quality is in place. Coupled with small releases, the objective is to quickly obtain feedback from the system.

The following should be automated in a Continuous Delivery system:

• Deployment
• Configuration Management
• Change Tracking
• Smoke Tests
• Testing

For maintainability purposes, the processes in a Continuous Delivery pipeline should be self-documenting.