The visibility that Continuous Delivery enables is another important aspect. The whole development process, including commits, builds, verifications, and deployments, can be tracked and comprehended in a single place. What visibility aspects are important in a Continuous Delivery pipeline?

First of all, it needs to be represented whether the software is in a shippable state. This includes the build's health in terms of compilation, tests, and code analyses. A dashboard or so-called extreme feedback device, such as physical green and red LEDs, provide a quick overview about it.

A reasonable build visibility ideally does not overload with information if the build is green but provides clear and direct insight in case of failing builds. This again follows the principle that there are no such things as warnings in the build; it either passes successfully and there is nothing else to do or it breaks and requires action. Dashboards or other devices that provide this green or red information already provide helpful insights. These visibility instruments should be accessible to all team members to embrace collaboration.

However, in order not to disrupt the day-to-day development too much, it makes sense to notify persons in charge, whose commits caused the build to break, first. They likely have further knowledge how to fix the build again without disturbing the work of their teammates if not necessary. CI servers provide functionality to send emails, use chat communication, or other forms of notification. This both increases the quality of the software as well as the developer's productivity.

The information that is gathered during builds can be used to measure the quality of the software project. This first of all includes build and test results and code quality metrics, such as test coverage. This information can be displayed over time to provide insights and trends about the software quality.

Other very interesting metadata concerns the build pipeline itself. How long does a build usually take? How many builds are there in a day? How often does the build fail? What is the most common failure cause? How long does it take a failing build to be fixed again (time to recover)? The answers to these questions provide helpful insights about the quality of the Continuous Delivery process.

The gathered information serves as good starting points to improve the process further. Visibility of Continuous Delivery not only illuminates the current project status but can also draw the engineers' attention to certain hotspots. The overall goal is to continuously improve the software.