Commit Build Ship
A field guide to committing with confidence, building trusted artifacts, and shipping software deliberately.
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COMMIT. BUILD. SHIP. is a practical guide to creating a software delivery process that teams can understand, trust, and repeat.
The book follows a software change through three connected stages:
- Commit establishes a workable repository, development environment, branch strategy, and change-control process. It treats every person who depends on the work-developers, reviewers, testers, operators, support staff, and end users-as a customer of the delivery path.
- Build explains how accepted source becomes a trustworthy artifact. It covers controlled build environments, automated pipelines, release builds, provenance, versioning, dependency records, and packaging. The central rule is that an artifact should be built once, clearly identified, and promoted without being rebuilt or manually altered.
- Ship moves that artifact through test, pre-production, and production. It addresses environment configuration, deployment readiness, certification, approvals, observability, rollback, recovery, and the operational records needed to explain what happened.
David Walker
David Walker was a council member at the ESRC where he chaired the methods and infrastructure committee. Formerly managing director, public reporting at the Audit Commission, he is a member of UK Biobank Ethics and Governance Committee.
During a career in journalism and public affairs, he worked for The Times Higher Education Supplement, The Economist, The Times, the BBC and the Guardian, where he was founding editor of Public magazine.
His books include Cameron’s Coup: How the Tories took Britain to the Brink, The Verdict: Did Labour Change Britain?, and Unjust Rewards: Exposing Greed and Inequality in Britain Today (all co written with Polly Toynbee), Sources Close to the Prime Minister (with Peter Hennessy and Michael Cockerell) and Media Made in California: Hollywood, Politics and the News (with Jeremy Tunstall).
More by David Walker
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