Introduction of continuous delivery in multi-customer project courses

Continuous delivery is a set of practices and principles to release software faster and more frequently. While it helps to bridge the gap between developers and operations for software in production, it can also improve the communication between developers and customers in the development phase, i.e. before software is in production. It shortens the feedback cycle and developers ideally use it right from the beginning of a software development project. In this paper we describe the implementation of a customized continuous delivery workflow and its benefits in a multi-customer project course in summer 2013. Our workflow focuses on the ability to deliver software with only a few clicks to the customer in order to obtain feedback as early as possible. This helps developers to validate their understanding about requirements, which is especially helpful in agile projects where requirements might change often. We describe how we integrated this workflow and the role of the release manager into our project-based organization and how we introduced it using different teaching methods. Within three months 90 students worked in 10 different projects with real customers from industry and delivered 490 releases. After the project course we evaluated our approach in an online questionnaire and in personal interviews. Our findings and observations show that participating students understood and applied the concepts and are convinced about the benefits of continuous delivery.