I was talking to a team that maintained a year-end batch process. Their code only ran once a year, on the first day of the new fiscal year.
When I talked to them about improving their delivery process, they assured me that they had no need for that. “We only deploy once a year so it doesn’t matter how long it takes to test or how long to deploy the code into production.”
So I asked them what would happen if on that one day that their code ran, they found a critical bug. “Would it be ok if you waited until the following year to try again, or do you need to try again immediately?”
That’s when it became obvious to them that their ability to get changes into production quickly was just as important for them as it was for a team that deployed multiple times a day.
Being able to get changes into production quickly and safely is important for every team, no matter how often you want to actually do it.