Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD) - What is CI/CD and how it makes software development better and faster?
In today’s world of software development, the only constant is change. Developers push changes to the code of software multiple times a day release new features and fix bugs. So any manual processes that can be automated to help developers focus on writing code instead of manually repeating tasks, can give a business advantage over competitors. This is why Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD) can be an excellent ally for development teams to reduce the time between deployments and get faster development speeds overall.
What is Continuous Integration?
Building, Testing and Deployment stages can be tedious for developers and waste their time focused on other important tasks. Automating these processes can help detect and validate changes, so risks can be reduced and the appropriate response can be quickly provided to bugs, outages, security flaws or anything else that can lead to a negative user experience.
Continuous Integration enables you to connect your code to a system that constantly monitors for changes. Any change such as a commit to the main code automatically triggers a build of your application and runs tests to make sure your application is secure and working as intended. A CI/CD pipeline automates the build, test and deploy stages of the development workflow, providing rapid feedback that lets you fix issues in minutes and deploy working software to clients without inefficient manual processes getting in the way.
If any tests fail, developers get an instant warning to fix issues. After issues are fixed, new commits are made which then trigger new build and test cycles. Once all tests are passed, the code enters a new stage at the CI/CD pipeline called Continuous Delivery.
Continuous Delivery
At this phase, the software is in a ready-state waiting to be deployed. Code that passed all the Continuous Integration steps is automatically pushed to a QA environment where it is manually checked for bugs and issues. If no problem is found, software is deployed to users, allowing them to enjoy a newer version of the software with new features and corrected bugs. If problems are detected, the code is sent back to developers for fixing.
Keys to success with a Continuous Delivery and Integration (CI/CD) pipeline
- Write/Use valuable tests that provide a detailed test coverage
- Commit early and as often as you can
- Build and test on every commit
- Fail quickly and solve issues ASAP
What are the benefits of implementing Continuous Delivery and Integration (CI/CD)?
- Faster delivery of software products to customers
- Reduced risks of malfunctions and security vulnerabilities
- Less time spent on manual tasks
- Improved confidence in the product and development workflow
Our development workflow at App Masters
We have adopted a Continuous Integration and Delivery pipeline at App Masters because we have found significant improvement in all the benefits listed above. To make this possible, we employ the use of Github Actions, Circle CI and a dozen other tools.
For more information about other practices we have implemented in our company to increase software development speeds, please check our previous post “How to increase software development speed”.
And If you have any questions on how your project can benefit from our Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD) pipeline please send us a message, we are glad to help.
Vitor Ferraz
Vitor Ferraz is a content producer from Curitiba who graduated in Advertising from the Federal University of Parana. He has lived in the USA and Canada and is now App Masters' Head of Marketing. Loves technology and new ideas. Photographer as a hobby. Enjoys good music and good food. He aspires to be a filmmaker one day.
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