Continuous Delivery
Continuous Delivery as described in continuousdelivery.com:
Continuous Delivery is the ability to get changes of all types—including new features, configuration changes, bug fixes and experiments—into production, or into the hands of users, safely and quickly in a sustainable way.
Our goal is to make deployments—whether of a large-scale distributed system, a complex production environment, an embedded system, or an app—predictable, routine affairs that can be performed on demand.
We achieve all this by ensuring our code is always in a deployable state, even in the face of teams of thousands of developers making changes on a daily basis. We thus completely eliminate the integration, testing and hardening phases that traditionally followed “dev complete”, as well as code freezes.
As you can imagine, it is very tied to Continuous Integration, and a good Continuous Integration implementation greatly empowers Continuous Delivery.
The idea that we can deliver new iterations of software at a very good pace and frequently improves the confidence on the system.
Continuous Delivery is not strictly tied to automated deliveries, but it can be implemented as such, where no human is required to press any button in order to deploy a new iteration of our system.