Introduction: What You Will Get From This Guide

This Smart Guide will help you win with more frequent releases. It will share what we learned at Assembla, and what market-winning companies have told us about their success in moving toward Continuous Delivery and Continuous Agile. It contains terms that will help you discuss your strategy and tactics with your development teams, managers, partners, and investors. You will learn about "test layering," "feature switches," "unveil," "learn before launch," and many other tactics.

In this guide you will find:

An overview of Agile techniques for task management, code management, and testing. Most people find one method that works and stick to it like dogma. We will show you more options. The overview will make you a smarter software developer who can pick the right tactics, and switch tactics at the right time.

Continuous Delivery. When I first heard about Kanban with continuous delivery - releasing every change - I thought it was magic. How would you test it? The answers are very practical. We break continuous delivery into components you can adopt.

A way to evolve your project from simple roadmapping and prototyping all the way to full continuous release. This is the "beyond scrum roadmap." It provides a high-speed alternative to more laborious project planning.

Recommendations for handling the new world of distributed teams and team building.

Revolutionary techniques to solve the most expensive problem in tech: scaling to larger teams and working productively in big software projects.

Continuous product management that will help your business keep up with your accelerating continuous development.

You will also find unique opinions that I have developed over decades of working with startup teams, pushing the boundaries of Internet technology starting in 1994, moving to SaaS in 1998, and building out distributed teams on the 2000's. This isn't the same corporate agile BS. It comes from first principles.

To round off these insights, we have included stories from other organizations that figured out how to thrash their competitors by releasing more frequently. Co-authors contributed ideas and chapters that expanded my understanding.

It is with great satisfaction that I present this guide to Continuous Agile. It connects innovations in Continuous Delivery with the traditions of Agile, in a way that is compatible with existing Scrum teams, but also works for modern, cloud-based teams.

For additional information about continuous agile, check out this video: