Many organizations are starting to adopt Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery and DevOps practices into their strategies as they grow in popularity. By doing so, these organizations are trying to reach a better level of development and innovation as well as satisfy both their teams and their customers.
What are Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery?
Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) is a combination of coding practices, work culture, and technological innovation, which bridges the gaps between development and operation activities and teams by enforcing automation in building, testing, and deployment of applications. It enables developers to develop more efficient and fast software releases, as well as ship better products and increase productivity.
The goal of CI is to enhance extensive testing to remove the uncertainty of changing code whereas CD drives the deployment process and decreases the possibility of human error. By using CI/CD pipelines, the software delivery process is automated, and the application is safely and efficiently deployed. CD is always ensuring that the project is working and up to date in order to give a great customer experience. CI/CD pipelines are thus giving more agility and speed to the development process.
What are the benefits of CI/CD?
More and more software companies are starting to adopt CI as it allows them to reach their goal as predicted. Indeed, the CI/CD pipeline helps to remove all manual tasks leading to fewer errors and more time to focus on features, hence, increasing the productivity of the team.
Moreover, CI/CD speeds up the development cycle as well as take the time to iterate and re-evaluate progress more often in order to get better products that meet the customers’ expectations. The CI/CD pipelines are able to enforce quality checks when running tests, so it meets all the specifications and avoids failures.
By making the development cycle shorter, CI/CD allows developers to experiment more and react to changing requirements faster, thus leading to more innovation. Besides, the pipelines are transparent and open, enabling everyone the possibility to make contributions and spot issues more quickly.
Conclusion
Implementing DevOps and CI/CD practices are endorsing work culture and technological innovation based on transparency, ownership, and communication. This transformation is slowly being adopted by many businesses as the CI/CD pipelines lead to more agility, more innovation, better quality products and give an enhanced customer experience.