Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment are forms of continuous testing that help the DevOps team and the business.
Businesses today rely on rapid software development and delivery to clients.
Therefore continuous testing solutions boost code quality, eliminate wasteful bottlenecks, and shorten the software development life cycle.
Article Contents
Continuous Integration (CI)
Continuous Integration aims to accelerate problem discovery and fixation, simplify code integration across a team of developers, enhance software quality, and compress release cycles for new feature upgrades.
Continuous Integration (CI) automatically incorporates several developers’ work into a single source code repository.
It’s a method used in software development where changes are continuously uploaded to a shared server (Github or Stash).
Continuous Deployment (CD)
When compared to continuous delivery, continuous deployment is a more advanced method.
This method ensures that any updates that make it through your production process are available to users immediately.
No humans are required, and any changes that don’t pass testing will be automatically rolled out to users.
Difference Between Continuous Delivery/ Continuous Deployment And Continuous Integration
Developers engage in continuous Integration (CI) when they routinely make incremental improvements and test their code.
The time that developers have to work on improving the product they’re responsible for is increased thanks to the efficiency gains from using CI.
Automating this process ensures that teams can create, test, and package their applications in a consistent and repeatable manner despite the large number of stages required and the complexity of the requirements.
The term “continuous delivery” (CD) refers to sending finished software to places like test and development servers.
Continuous Delivery (CD) automates and standardizes the code delivery process to these environments.
The next stage after continuous delivery is continuous deployment.
There will be frequent deployments because any modification that passes the automated testing will be immediately pushed there.
How Is CI/CD related To DevOps?
DevOps relies on software development lifecycle automation to decrease human labor (SDLC). DevOps best practice CI/CD frees up resources.
Automation lets teams integrate changes, test, and deliver to clients fast. Without CI/CD, these activities would need separate, time-consuming processes.
CI/CD helps firms improve and deliver consistently. Automation makes building and testing consistent.
CI/CD helps DevOps balance development and operational priorities.
Development teams want to provide improvements more regularly, whereas operations teams desire stability.
CI/CD bridges it. Automation helps dev teams release changes faster, while operations teams benefit from standardized and automated testing to automate application construction, packaging, and testing.
Benefits Of CI/CD
Faster To Market
Although large technology companies were early adopters of Agile and DevOps practices, which have helped them streamline their development procedures and provide their consumers with continuous enhancements, the playing field is now more even.
With the right deployment strategy in place, companies will have more time to test and iteratively improve upon new features before releasing them to the public.
If companies can confidently and rapidly roll out updates, they will be able to react to emerging trends and ease user pain points as they arise.
Lowered Potential For Harm
Cutting down on the time it takes to bring a product to market has benefits beyond merely keeping up with the competition.
When updates are made often, product managers and marketers may become more involved in the creation process.
A QA team can save time and energy on a feature that doesn’t genuinely address an issue for their users if they can test either with test participants in a pre-production environment or with real users.
Less Time Spent Reviewing
While implementing continuous Integration, code is changed more regularly, at least once daily.
Sharing code frequently with the rest of the team helps keep everyone on the same page, speeds up code reviews, and makes it simpler to incorporate changes.
As a code reviewer, your mental load will be lessened while working with smaller iterations.
More detailed commit messages result from fewer commits, making it easier to follow the development of the logic.
There is less code to rewrite and fewer conflicts to resolve if adjustments are required before a commit can be merged.
Rapid Bug Fixing
There will always be the odd issue that makes it past automated testing and into production, no matter how much better the code quality is.
In continuous updates and releases, each release will have a limited number of code changes, making it much easier to pinpoint the source of an issue.
Since the commits are smaller, testers are less likely to undo any progress made in other areas.
A CI/CD pipeline removes the significant barrier of performing automated tests, reducing the likelihood that quality will be sacrificed.
CI/CD Tools
- Jenkins- Jenkins, an open-source automation server, handles central build and Continuous Integration. Jenkins builds, deploys, and automates software development projects using hundreds of plugins. Java-based, it runs on Windows, macOS, and Unix-like platforms.
- CircleCI- CircleCI is a CI/CD technology that helps release and develop software quickly. CircleCI provides continuous Integration on local infrastructure or in the cloud. It automates code building, testing, and deployment.
- TeamCity- TeamCity is an open-source, Java-based CI/CD pipeline server. It is created and maintained by JetBrains, which also makes PyCharm, IntelliJ Idea, and others. TeamCity is available on Windows or Linux servers.
Conclusion
CI/CD is an essential part of continuous testing. At the same time, testing automation is the best way to keep up with the users’ demands.
Try HeadSpin Platform offers comprehensive testing capabilities across applications, devices, and networks for mobile, web, IoT, and 5G technologies for enterprises’ development and testing teams.
It also offers continuous monitoring to keep your company’s digital health intact.
