Describing Continuous Delivery (Without Using the Term)

From Tom DeMarco’s article Software Engineering: An Idea Whose Time Has Come and Gone? [PDF]:

You say to your team leads, “I have a finish date in mind, and I’m not even going to share it with you. When I come in one day and tell you the project will end in one week, you have to be ready to package up and deliver what you’ve got as the final product. Your job is to go about the project incrementally, adding pieces to the whole in the order of their relative value, and doing integration and documentation and acceptance testing incrementally as you go.”

DeMarco isn’t recommending specific methodologies like Agile, but this is a pretty good business oriented description of Continuous Delivery without continuous (production) deployment.