One of the biggest hurdles to implementing continuous delivery and DevOps in industrial environments – dealing with milestones / macroscopic quality gates – can be overcome with a continuous quality assurance approach that applies the "green to green" and "shift left" paradigms not only to software, but also to non-software artifacts.

In an industrial environment, software delivery requires much more than just working software. To formally release a change and deploy it into production requires many further non-software artifacts that cannot be covered by the continuous integration tool chain, no matter how sophisticated it is.

However, using the classical milestone / macroscopic quality gate process is no longer an option, as this limits the deployment frequency to values that are outside the range of the desired target. Therefore, a rethinking of the release process is required.

This presentation provides insights into our experience with several implementations of a new approach to analyzing and tracking non-software quality criteria through the introduction of a continuous conformance concept.

This concept applies the "green to green" and "shift left" paradigms – well established in the software space – also to the non-software artifacts required to release and deploy a software change.

Combined with a continuous delivery pipeline, this results in a continuous quality assurance flow that also enables industrial enterprises to take advantage of the many opportunities and benefits that arise from continuous enhancements of their products and services while maintaining their high quality standards.