Continuous deployment contrasts with continuous delivery (also abbreviated CD), a similar approach in which software functionalities are also frequently delivered and deemed to be potentially capable of being deployed, but are actually not deployed.[4] As such, continuous deployment can be viewed as a more complete form of automation than continuous delivery.[5]
^Holmstrom Olsson, Helena; Alahyari, Hiva; Bosch, Jan (2012). "Climbing the "Stairway to Heaven" -- A Mulitiple-Case Study Exploring Barriers in the Transition from Agile Development towards Continuous Deployment of Software". 2012 38th Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications. IEEE Computer Society. pp. 392–399. doi:10.1109/SEAA.2012.54. ISBN978-0-7695-4790-9. S2CID15199568.
^Claps, Gerry Gerard; Berntsson Svenssonb, Richard; Aurum, Aybüke (2014). "On the journey to continuous deployment: Technical and social challenges along the way". Information and Software Technology. 57: 21–31. doi:10.1016/j.infsof.2014.07.009.
^Shahin, Mojtaba; Babar, Muhammad Ali; Zahedi, Mansooreh; Zhu, Liming (2017). "Beyond Continuous Delivery: An Empirical Investigation of Continuous Deployment Challenges". 2017 ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM). pp. 111–120. doi:10.1109/ESEM.2017.18. ISBN978-1-5090-4039-1. S2CID3479812.
^"Continuous Deployment: An Essential Guide". IBM. 2019-10-02. Retrieved 2022-11-28. Continuous deployment is the natural outcome of continuous delivery done well. Eventually, the manual approval delivers little or no value and is merely slowly things down. At that point, it is done away with and continuous delivery becomes continuous deployment.