What is Continuous Deployment? — UK Software Development Guide
Direct Answer
Continuous Deployment (CD) is a software development practice where every code change that passes the automated test suite is automatically deployed to production — without human approval. This contrasts with Continuous Delivery, where deployment to production requires a manual trigger. Continuous Deployment requires high confidence in automated tests to avoid shipping broken code to production.
Continuous-deployment in the UK
Continuous Deployment is less common in UK regulated sectors than Continuous Delivery. The reason: FCA, NHS, and GDS all have change management requirements that expect human review before production changes. FCA PS21/3 operational resilience expects documented change management processes. NHS DSP Toolkit Standard 6 expects change management for clinical software. ClickMasters uses Continuous Delivery (not Deployment) for most UK client projects — a manual approval gate to production satisfies regulatory change management requirements while maintaining fast delivery.
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