What is the need to have our software always ready to be deployed to production? Well, it enables us to test out new ideas and features as soon as possible. Code that is lingering in the repository without being used by the customers is of no use. In a similar vein, bugs in production can also be fixed pretty quickly.

Doing frequent releases to production also reduces the risk involved in releasing to production. A huge delay between releases leads to lots of changes happening in production at the same time. The risk of breaking things is very high, and the costs of finding and fixing the issues are high as well. It is also this risk and fear of doing releases that causes the divide between the development team and the operations folks or system admins. Frequent releases help in keeping the changes small, and issues can be isolated and fixed faster.