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What is software delivery?

What software delivery is, how it works, and why it’s critical to digital success

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Overview

Accelerate your software delivery and enhance security

Software delivery is the complete process of developing, testing, deploying, and maintaining software applications. It includes everything required to get working software into the hands of users—from writing code to monitoring performance after release.

In DevOps and enterprise IT, software delivery emphasizes automation, speed, collaboration, and reliability. It connects software development and operations to ensure faster, safer, and more frequent releases.

Software delivery

What is the goal of software delivery?

The goal of software delivery is to provide high-quality, secure, and reliable software to users quickly and continuously, while aligning with business objectives.

How is software delivery different from software development?

Software development focuses on coding and building features. Software delivery covers the full lifecycle: coding, testing, deployment, monitoring, and updates in production environments.

What does software delivery mean in DevOps?

DevOps streamlines software delivery by breaking down silos between development and operations, automating workflows, and fostering a culture of collaboration and continuous improvement between development and operations teams to accelerate delivery and reduce risk.

Why is software delivery important for enterprise IT?

Software delivery helps enterprise IT teams respond to business needs faster, improve service quality, reduce downtime, and increase agility across large-scale, complex systems.

What challenges do enterprises face in software delivery?

Common challenges include legacy infrastructure, siloed teams, slow release cycles, poor visibility, and difficulty scaling DevOps practices across the SDLC in large organizations.

What are key components of software delivery?

  • Strategic planning: Aligns development with business goals, ensuring teams build the right things at the right time to drive value.
  • Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD): Enables fast, reliable code changes by automating build, test, and deployment pipelines—minimizing manual effort and reducing errors.
  • Automated testing: Catches bugs early and often, ensuring code quality without slowing down delivery cycles.
  • Infrastructure as code: Standardizes and automates infrastructure provisioning, improving consistency, scalability, and speed across environments.
  • Release management: Coordinates the deployment of new features and fixes in a controlled, trackable way—balancing speed with stability.
  • Monitoring and observability: Provides real-time visibility into system performance and user experience, enabling faster detection and resolution of issues.
  • Security and compliance integration: Bakes security into every phase of development to reduce risk, meet regulatory requirements, and avoid costly rework later.

What tools are used in software delivery?

Popular tools include:

  • CI/CD: These tools automate code integration, testing, and deployment—critical for fast, reliable delivery.
  • Containers and orchestration: Containerization ensures consistent environments, while orchestration enables scalable, resilient deployments.
  • Infrastructure as Code (IaC): IaC tools define infrastructure via code, reducing drift and enabling version-controlled, repeatable environments.
  • Monitoring: Monitoring tools offer real-time visibility into performance, availability, and system health—key to minimizing downtime.

How can large organizations improve software delivery?

Start by embracing DevOps principles, automating repetitive tasks, adopting CI/CD pipelines, shifting left on security, and continuously measuring and improving delivery performance. Enterprise teams can improve software delivery by:

  • Automating manual processes
  • Standardizing toolchains
  • Adopting DevSecOps practices
  • Breaking down silos between dev, sec, and ops
  • Using metrics to continuously monitor and improve delivery performance (e.g., DORA metrics)

What OpenText tools support software delivery?

OpenText has solutions in all areas of software delivery — development, security, and operations, tailored to fit your enterprise needs.

  • Development: OpenText™ DevOps Cloud accelerates software delivery by automating DevOps workflows end-to-end. It enhances developer experience, improves release speed and quality, and helps teams meet business demands. OpenText Core Software Delivery Platform provides an end-to-end DevOps solution that lets you adopt at your own pace with a modular platform that covers your entire digital value stream—from planning to building, testing, delivering, and running your applications.
  • Security: OpenText™ Cybersecurity Cloud helps organizations stay ahead of evolving threats with unified, intelligent protection. It delivers advanced threat visibility, adaptive security posture management, and comprehensive coverage across identities, data, applications, and devices—all while simplifying compliance and strengthening overall resilience.
  • Operations: OpenText™ Observability and Service Management Cloud—a composable platform that unifies service management, AIOps, observability, automation, CMDB, and asset management cuts the cost and complexity to transform the way you work. You can reveal assets accurately, resolve problems faster, and reduce operational waste. Operational freedom is your new normal.

Discover how to modernize and accelerate your software delivery

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Resources

  • Pick n Pay

    Retailer enhances visibility, traceability, quality, release velocity, and test automation across platforms and devices with OpenText™ Core Software Delivery Platform (ValueEdge)

  • Leading Las Vegas hospitality company

    A large entertainment complex in Las Vegas saves time and gains visibility in application lifecycle management by upgrading to OpenText™ Core Software Delivery Platform

Related products

OpenText™ DevOps Cloud

Ship better software—faster—with AI-driven DevOps automation, testing, and quality

OpenText™ Core Software Delivery Platform

Maximize value, reduce risk, and speed delivery with end-to-end DevOps

OpenText™ Cybersecurity Cloud

Defend with precision, secure with confidence

OpenText™ Observability and Service Management Cloud

Cut the cost and complexity of IT Operations

OpenText™ Software Delivery Management

Supercharge your DevOps pipeline with top-tier quality and insight

See all related products

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