Continuous delivery is a DevOps practice. It refers to adopting the practice of generating quality application artifacts that are readily deployable in new or existing environments by executing quality checks on both the code and functionality by ensuring that the application meets both technical and functional specifications. Continuous delivery also ensures that the code in the main branch is always in a state that is readily deployable to any environment including a production environment. It helps in achieving a state that makes sure that the build and quality of software meets the specification and there are no surprises or risks in it being used for deployment to a production environment. It can also be referred as a state of readiness for the application code and configuration.

Application developers continually change code and to ensure that changes are acceptable only when they meet the functional and technical specification, they are deployed to an environment and successfully validated. If there are issues in build, deployment, and configuration of the environment and software, immediate feedback is provided to developers so that those issues can be fixed immediately.