Controlled Continuous Deployment: A Case Study From The Telecommunications Domain

Paper in proceeding, 2022

Continuous deployment has become a widely used practice in web-based software applications. Deploying a new software version to production is a seamless automated process executed thousands of times per day. Continuous deployment reduces the time between a code commit and that commit is active in production. While continuous deployment promises many advantages to software development organizations, the adoption of continuous deployment in the software-intensive embedded systems industry is limited. Several empirical studies have highlighted the challenges associated with software-intensive embedded systems. However, very few studies, if any at all, have attempted to provide a practical approach to realize continuous deployment to these systems. This paper proposes a Controlled Continuous Deployment (CCD) approach, which considers the constraints software-intensive embedded systems have, such as high reliability and availability requirements, limited possibility for rollback after deployment, and the high volume of in-service systems in the market. We derived the approach by conducting a case study at Ericsson AB, focusing on three Radio Access Networks (RAN) technologies embedded software used in 3G, 4G, and 5G mobile networks.