We have seen the necessity of moving fast in a fast moving world. It's important to put emphasis on agility and reactiveness towards the customer's demands, the time-to-market, or better, time-to-production. The best features don't deliver value, until they are in the customer's hands.

It makes sense to use concepts and technology that help achieve this goal, such as Continuous Delivery, automation, infrastructure as code, and automated software tests.

This is what represents the biggest benefit of modern environments and cloud technology: the ability to move fast. Application environments for new projects, features, or test scenarios, can be created in a matter of minutes, using well-defined specifications. In particular, infrastructure as code and container technology support these attempts. Software developers deliver the environment configuration together with the application code, contained in the project's repository.

Defining all contents of enterprise software thus becomes a responsibility of the whole engineering team. Developers, as well as operational engineers, are interested in shipping software that provides value to its users. The whole software team is accountable for achieving this goal.

This also includes the topic of software quality assurance. Delivering features with rapid pace is only possible if proper, automated quality verification mechanisms are in place. Tests that require human intervention and that don't run reliably or fast enough prevent fast processes and keep developers from doing more useful work. It's a necessity to invest effort in automated, sufficient, and reliable test cases that are built with maintainability and code quality in mind.