Continuous delivery a typical improvement to CI. Applying the principle of Agile software practices, it's based on the definition of done for a software developer. A task is done when there's no more manual or untested steps involved in getting the related code pushed to production.
When you tell your Project Lead that you have completed development on item #987
; in many cases, you may mean that you have done the following things:
Developed the item
Ran some tests
Maybe wrote some automated tests
Possibly asked a colleague to review your code
Is your code actually ready for production? Did you do the following:
Compute the QA metrics to ensure that the code follows team conventions and make application look better than it was before you contributed (known as boy scoots principle )
Run the deployment process in a production equivalent environment
Run acceptance and performance tests on the application to check its impact
Give the production team enough information so that they don...