Success Factors when Transitioning to Continuous Deployment in Software-Intensive Embedded Systems

Abstract

Continuous Deployment is the practice to deploy software more frequently to customers and learn from their usage. The aim is to introduce new functionality and features in an additive way to customers as soon as possible. While Continuous Deployment is becoming popular among web and cloud-based software development organizations, the adoption of continuous deployment within the software-intensive embedded systems industry is still limited.In this paper, we conducted a case study at a multinational telecommunications company focusing on the Third Generation Radio Access Network (3G RAN) embedded software. The organization has transitioned to Continuous Deployment where the software’s deployment cycle has been reduced to 4 weeks from 24 weeks. The objective of this paper is to identify what does success means when transitioning to continuous deployment and the success factors that companies need to attend to when transitioning to continuous deployment in a large-scale embedded software.