The True Power of Continuous Delivery: Reducing Risk and Increasing Effectiveness | Martin Hinshelwood
👋 Hi, I’m Martin Hinshelwood from NKD Agility, and in this video, I explore the real value of continuous delivery—and it’s not just about being faster. While speed is a byproduct, the true benefits lie in consistency, reliability, and risk reduction through automation. I’ll share examples, including lessons from Knight Capital Group and CrowdStrike, to illustrate why continuous delivery is essential for modern software development.
📌 Chapters:
- 00:00 – Introduction: What is Continuous Delivery?
- 02:15 – The True Benefit: Reducing Risk and Increasing Reliability
- 05:00 – Lessons from Knight Capital and CrowdStrike
- 08:30 – Feedback Loops: How Continuous Delivery Improves Effectiveness
- 12:00 – Real-World Example: Azure DevOps Team’s Transformation
- 15:30 – Scaling Continuous Delivery: The Windows Team Example
- 18:00 – How DevOps Practices Enable Continuous Delivery
🎯 Who This Video is For:
• Engineering leaders looking to reduce risk in software delivery
• Teams aiming to implement or improve continuous delivery practices
• Organizations seeking faster, more reliable deployment processes
• Agile and DevOps practitioners focused on improving feedback loops
📖 What You’ll Learn:
• Why consistency and reliability are the core benefits of continuous delivery
• How automation in DevOps reduces the risk of human error
• The importance of faster feedback loops in improving product quality
• Real-world examples of how continuous delivery transforms delivery capabilities
• How practices like continuous testing and deployment ensure business protection
💡 Key Takeaways:
• Continuous delivery isn’t just about speed—it’s about reducing risk and increasing consistency.
• Automation is key to protecting your business, brand, employees, and customers.
• Shorter feedback loops lead to faster problem detection and resolution.
• Examples like Azure DevOps and Windows teams show the scalability of continuous delivery.
At NKD Agility, we help organizations unlock the full potential of continuous delivery and DevOps practices. Ready to reduce risk, improve reliability, and deliver value faster? Visit us today on
https://www.nkdagility.com
and let’s transform your delivery processes together.
#agile #productdevelopment #productmanagement #projectmanagement #devops #agileproductdevelopment #agileproductmanagement #agileprojectmanagement #projectmanager #productmanager #productowner #scrummaster #professionalscrumtrainer #scrum #leanproductdevelopment
Watch on Youtube
If you’re trying to unlock the power of continuous delivery, then you’ve probably considered the type of benefits that you get from it, and perhaps they’re not the benefits you think. While it is true that continuous delivery can help you become faster, that’s a lagging side effect of the work that you would do. The real benefit of continuous delivery is the requirement for automation within the context of DevOps, and the real value of automation within the context of DevOps is you’ve not got a person doing the deployment; you’ve got an automated tool during the deployment. So you gain consistency and reliability of what is happening, and that consistency and reliability reduces your risk.
If you’re interested in how much risk that is, there’s one example that I always used to use, which was the Night Capital Group, a financially traded stock exchange organisation in the US. They did a deployment of their software; it failed due to various reasons, mostly to do with manual deployments. They ended up losing about $10,000 an hour or a minute or whatever it was, but at the end of the day, they had to file for bankruptcy, and at the beginning of the day, they had $450 million in the bank.
So that’s the example I usually use. Probably today, I would say CrowdStrike. If you’ve got automation that checks that your system, that what it is you’ve created, your teams have created, is good and meets the minimum bar for the business, what’s your risk level? That’s the power of continuous delivery: consistency and limiting risk. You can ensure that within your continuous delivery process, you have the checks that you as a business require to protect your business.
So there’s protecting your business, protecting your brand, protecting your employees, and protecting your customers. All of those things can mostly be automated. Almost all of those things that could possibly go wrong can be automated. You can’t automate legal stuff, so you would still have to handle some things there. But from the context of not wanting my software to fail, not wanting it to send money to the wrong place, we use testing, we use automation, we use continuous delivery, continuous everything: continuous testing, continuous deployment, continuous delivery.
Those are the things that help you get faster feedback because if it’s an automated process, you can go around that loop, and the developers can find out that it’s broken or it’s not doing the right thing much faster. A great example of that is the Azure DevOps team at Microsoft, which went from delivering 12 features to production per year for 600 people to delivering 280 features to production per year for 600 people.
So the number of people didn’t change, but they massively increased the number of features delivered. Part of doing that was changing the feedback loop, making the feedback loop faster. They went from an automated build that would take days to get a response from to one that took minutes and seconds to get a response from. They used to have to run their full suite of tests in, I think it was four or five days, to actually get a response for a particular thing, and now it’s three and a half minutes for the entire test suite.
That level of feedback makes feedback faster, costs less, reduces risk, and increases effectiveness. That shortened the feedback loop. If you’re also deploying and getting your feature in front of customers, that continuous delivery piece means you’re getting your product in front of real customers. You’re moving to production on a continuous basis.
Even the Windows team, which is probably the biggest, most complicated product on the planet, is 24 hours or less doing continuous delivery from developer cutting code to being in the hands of real production users, albeit inside of Microsoft. It’s 24 hours; it’s a week. They’ve got it in front of real external users; it’s a month. They’ve got it in front of 20 million external users, and then it’s three months. They’ve got it in front of, I don’t know, 850 million external users.
If CrowdStrike was doing what the Windows team does, they would not have caused the errors that they did. Continuous delivery, the practices within the context of DevOps that enable continuous delivery, are the things that reduce risk, increase effectiveness, and give you faster feedback.
