On the effects of continuous delivery on code quality: A case study in industry

Continuous delivery has been adopted by organizations to make software available to their users at any time. The transition from traditional software delivery methodologies to continuous delivery can impact on the results generated by organizations, e.g., the quality of source code and products. Although widely adopted, little is known about its effects. To account for this, this article reports a case study on the effects of continuous delivery on the quality of source code and products produced. Our case study was carried out for 12 months within a software development company in Brazil. Our findings indicate that the adoption of continuous delivery practices improved the quality of delivered products, mainly considering the number of defects reported by customers, the number of demands delivered per month, and user satisfaction. However, the adoption of continuous delivery did not favor the quality of source code, including the number of bugs, security vulnerabilities, code smells, duplicated code, and code complexity. Researchers and practitioners may benefit from our findings typically when delivering software products, designing and seeking to improve deployment pipeline practices. Finally, our study draws up some implications and shows the potential of adopting continuous delivery for developing enterprise applications that are constantly evolving.