What is CI/CD? Continuous integration and continuous delivery are explained

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What is CI/CD? Continuous integration and continuous delivery are explained

CI/CD stands for continuous integration and continuous delivery. CI/CD are the most commonly accepted alternative to shortening software development and delivery cycle. In today’s, the top challenges for the software industry are to respond quickly to customer and market needs. The CI/CD emerged as pivotal solutions to come up with these challenges.

What is continuous integration?

Software integration was first performed by using important practices of Extreme Programming. Software integration is not required for stable projects but is essential to deal with frequent changes in many projects. Sometimes waiting for integration can create integration conflicts and take too much time to resolve and will delay project leading.

“Continuous integration help to make sure that software components are working together effectively and efficiently. Integration must have to complete frequently if it is possible to perform on an hourly and daily basis”.

In continuous integration, software developers build, run, and test code at their workstation before transferring code to version control repository. After doing changes to the repository, the events are put into motion. The first step in this chain is to use the latest source code. After a successful build, unit testing is performed. After unit testing, the build is deployed to test the changes made in the environment. The information is delivered to the team about the status of a process, and other details such as defects, build number, and number of tests.

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Tasks for CI pipeline

The following tasks are involved in the CI pipeline;

After new commits detect the changes made in a source code repository

  • Analyze the quality of source code
  • Make builds
  • Execution of unit testing
  • Execution of integration testing
  • Generate deployable artifacts
  • Status of reports

If one of the above-described steps fail, the following process needs to follow;

  • Integration can be stopped or continued by depending upon the severity of defects and configuration
  • Share results with the team by using email or chat systems
  • Teams debug and fix bugs that occur, and commits again
  • Perform tasks again and again

What is continuous delivery?

Continuous delivery started where the continuous integration ends. Continuous integration is a procedure to build and test automatically, and continuous delivery deploys all the changes in the code to build the testing and staging environment.

Continuous delivery makes sure that the builds to the production environment are releases when required. Before deploying software to a production environment, the continuous delivery process contains automated system testing, unit testing, and integration testing. When a test fails at any level, CI/CD must include feedback to channels to report testing failure quickly to developers.

Depending upon the processes and procedures defined by teams, the developers must have to do the following with CI/CD;

Step 1: Before committing changes, the developers must have to check the current build is successful or not, if not then before committing fix all bugs.

Step 2: If the current build is successful, then reset the workstation to build configuration.

Step 3: Also build and test locally to make sure that any update cannot break system functionalities. If build and test are successful then commit new changes.

Step 4: Allow Continuous integration to make new changes.

Step 5: If this becomes fail then stop and fix errors on local workstations. Go back to Step3.

Step 6: If build successful then continue working on other items.

This article was written in collaboration with experts from the Buddy

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