In a recent post to his blog Clay Loveless looks at something he believes is important to create quality software in any organization - continuous deployment (CD).

I’m no continuous deployment expert, but it’s gotten some attention after yesterday’s highlight at an Etsy board meeting. Companies making the most of continuous deployment were designed to do so from the very early stages. [...] It takes a lot of discipline to implement all of the [testing methods and development cycles]. It takes even more to make sure that these kinds of processes get put in place early in a company's life.

The parts of a successful continuous deployment process include unit testing, a controlled feature cycle, black box testing and good instrumentation to keep track of it all. Clay wonders why, when there's so many tools and information out there about CD, companies still wouldn't implement it. He notes that putting it in after the fact is very rare and is usually avoided by the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mentality.