The book Accelerate states, “Continuous delivery improves both delivery performance and quality, and also helps improve culture and reduce burnout and deployment pain.” Those of us who work this way know this is true. We also know that CD is a powerful tool for organizational improvement. Neither of these will be true if we aren’t using a real CD workflow. It is very common for teams and organizations to use incorrect definitions of CD. When they do, it harms outcomes, team morale, and is even causing CD to be banned in some organizations.

At the 2021 DevOps Enterprise Summit, several of us gathered at the Dockside Bar to discuss this problem we are witnessing. We formed a cross-industry group to try to help codify the minimum set of problems that need to be solved to see the benefits of continuous delivery in every context so everyone can live better lives. Three days later we published the first version of MinimumCD.org. A week later we accepted a pull request from one of the fathers of CD, Dave Farley.

In this talk, we will cover the set of fundamental problems to be solved to achieve CD and how working to solve those problems acts as forcing functions for finding and removing the waste and pain that so many organizations are suffering daily. Everyone in the value stream should live better lives, and solving these problems will go a long way to getting us there.