What term refers to the practice of regularly delivering updates or patches to software?

The term that best describes the practice of regularly delivering updates or patches to software is known as rolling updates. This process involves incrementally updating software systems in a way that minimizes downtime and maintains system availability. With rolling updates, new software versions are gradually deployed to different parts of the system or to subsets of users, allowing for constant updates and improvements while still providing a consistent user experience.

In contrast, other terms may describe related but distinct practices. Continuous integration primarily focuses on the automation and integration of code changes into a shared repository, ensuring that software can be built and tested frequently. Automated deployments involve the use of tools and scripts to deploy updates automatically, but they do not necessarily imply the gradual or phased approach that rolling updates signify. Iterative updates refer to a broader methodology for development, focusing on improving software over successive iterations but not specifically tied to the delivery of updates in a continuous manner like rolling updates do.