First, what's continuous delivery? Seamless change to maintain productivity.

Jez Humble says that:

"Continuous Delivery is the ability to get changes of all types; including new features, configuration changes, bug fixes and experiments into production, or into the hands of users, safely and quickly in a sustainable way."

Not being a super technical person, I love his summary of the principles of continuous delivery. It's not about the tools. It's all about business value.

I love this bit also, which answers so many excuses I've heard from software vendors and consultants over the years (emphasis mine):

"It is often assumed that if we want to deploy software more frequently, we must accept lower levels of stability and reliability in our systems. In fact, peer-reviewed research shows that this is not the case— high performance teams consistently deliver services faster and more reliably than their low performing competition."

Second, what do I know? I started in sales, but now I build reports.

I've been building reports in Power BI and Excel Power Pivot for 3 years— about as long as Power BI has been in public release. For one awesome year, I did DAX helpdesk for PowerPivotPro.com. Before that, I worked with developers as a business analyst for a small software company for a few years, which is where I discovered a knack for thinking about relational databases, as well as the value of separate beta and production environments . When I worked in sales, I discovered how cool it was to create reports and dashboards in Salesforce. Along the way, I've worked with a variety of products, some which empower users to remain productive, and others that are expensive to the business in terms of their disruptive releases.

What this post is not about:

Not about Continuous Integration or Continuous Deployment. See this post on how the concepts relate.

Not about Microsoft's Power BI teams Continuous Delivery. They do better than I do!

Not so much about technical details.

I also don't speak for my company.

Continuous delivery in Power BI. Do we want to do it? How far can we get?

I'm interested in a high level discussion about the value of continuous delivery, but in Power BI, so we're going to have to touch on the technical as well. I'm a pragmatic person, which means I always want to know how to get as close as possible to my desired results today. I don't always consider how changes to the platform could get me closer.

Do we want reliability in Power BI reports?

Report consumers certainly do. I also know that reliability impacts adoption. I do want it, and if I have to choose, I prefer a working report with stale data to broken reports or reports with bad data. Do others want it? I would hope that others do. I spoke to one person at a Power BI user group who doesn't like his reports breaking every time he updates his SQL queries, but wasn't sure about how to clone his production environment on the Power BI service. I combed Ideas.Powerbi.com, but I only saw one person who has a similar approach to me with cloned workspaces. As a data person, I'm not sure about the demand yet.

Microsoft is certainly thinking about it. In the very comprehensive whitepaper (published in July 2018) Planning a Power BI Enterprise Deployment by Melissa Coates ( BlueGranite ) and Chris Webb ( Crossjoin Consulting ), Option 2 is:

Dev, Test, Prod = Distinct App Workspaces + Distinct Apps

Publish Type = Manual

The whitepaper also notes items in the Power BI roadmap to streamline this process.

What am I and others doing for continuous delivery?

I have a few blog posts approaching the topic, but I've only just connected explicitly with the idea of continuous delivery.

What about you? What do you think about continuous delivery in Power BI?

Do you use two workspaces, or do you think that's too much effort?

What do you do to keep the costs of disruptions in reporting to a minimum?

What ideas on ideas.powerbi.com support these goals, and are you voting for them? For example, this is a roadmap item, but it only has 4 votes: We would like the ability to replicate reports from one group workspace to another.

What ideas could we add to ideas.powerbi.com to advance this goals?

Others doing continuous delivery

I think I first heard the term Continuous Delivery when LinkedIn started doing it. I'm also used to it from having deployed code (with help from a developer) to Salesforce.