Defining metrics for continuous delivery and deployment pipeline

Continuous delivery is a software development practice where new features are made available to end users as soon as they have been implemented and tested. In such a setting, a key technical piece of infrastructure is the development pipeline that consists of various tools and databases, where features flow from development to deployment and then further to use. Metrics, unlike those conventionally used in software development, are needed to help define the performance of the development pipeline. In this paper, we address metrics that are suited for supporting continuous delivery and deployment through a descriptive and exploratory single case study on a project of a mid-sized Finnish software company, Solita Plc. As concrete data, we use data from project ”Lupapiste”, a web site for managing municipal authorizations and permissions.