We are living in a digitally enabled world where most critical business processes are managed by applications. To keep pace with ever-changing business requirements and market dynamics, software vendors are under tremendous pressure to deliver innovation at speed. Due to these speed constraints, development models like the Waterfall model have been replaced with Agile and DevOps, where vendors commit to releasing new features at an accelerated pace. To achieve agility, vendors need to understand the importance of the CI/CD pipeline.
In this blog, we will highlight the significance of the CI CD pipeline in the current landscape of software development. We will discuss its benefits and explain why innovative companies cannot afford to ignore them.
Limitations of Traditional Software Development models
Slow-Release Cycle
Previously, testing was not considered a part of the development process; instead, it was viewed as the final step in development. However, identifying bugs at the end of the process often required significant rework and a reevaluation of strategy, leading to delays and a slower release cycle.
High Failure Rates
Most companies rely on manual approaches in software development. When manual testing is used, there is a possibility of bugs due to inadequate coverage. Bugs in the production can impact business continuity, ultimately leading to revenue losses.
Limited Collaboration
In traditional software development model, developers used to work in silos and there was very limited collaboration. After spending weeks, a developer can commit its code to the main central repository. Similarly, other developers also commit their codes to centralized code repository. Since testing was mostly done after development, not in parallel, codes clash happens during final integration, making releases risky and time-consuming, often involving long downtime windows.
What is CI/CD Pipeline?
CI refers to continuous integration while CD refers to continuous delivery. The pipeline consists of steps that developers must follow in order to deliver a new version of software. In this process, a lot of steps are automated such as development, testing, production, and monitoring phases to develop higher quality code, faster and more securely.
Continuous Integration
As stated above, when developers work in silos, there can be "merge hell" when multiple developers merge their codes to central repository. Continuous Integration (CI) addresses these issues as developers commit their codes on a more frequent basis to central repository. When codes are committed continuously, continuous testing is also triggered to avoid bug accumulation for later stages of development. Simply put, continuous integration automates development, testing, production, and monitoring phases of the software development lifecycle. Test automation tools automatically trigger tests to review code whenever changes are merged.
Continuous Delivery
Once CI process is done, continuous delivery (CD) comes into play. This is an infrastructure provisioning and application release process in which automation is used to package everything that an application needs during deployment across any environment at any time.
Continuous Deployment
This takes continuous delivery a step further, allowing organizations to deploy applications or roll out releases without any human intervention. In this approach, the release criteria are predefined by the development team. Once those criteria are met and validated, the code is automatically deployed to the production environment.
Benefits of CI/CD Pipeline
Since the code changes are tested frequently i.e. continuous testing in place, developers get feedback quickly. So, bugs can be detected and fixed early.
As this approach is more focused on phase-wise development, customers get new features continuously. This keeps the wheel of innovation continuously moving forward.
Since new features are rolled out continuously, this makes organizations more agile. This helps them keep pace with market dynamics.
Research states that fixing a bug in production is 6X costlier as compared to fixing it in the development phase. So, small iteration, continuous testing, and rapid feedback ensures that development cost remains within budget.
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