CI/CD is the acronym for the combined practices of Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD). CI/CD practices are currently the most widely accepted choice to shorten software development and delivery cycle time.
In today’s ever-evolving landscape, one of the top challenges for software companies is quickly responding to market and customer demands. And CI/CD methodology emerged as the pivotal solution to such a challenge. Read on to find out more about CI/CD and how these practices are performed.
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Continuous Integration (CI) is a software development practice where developers frequently merge their code changes into a shared repository, usually several times a day. Each merge triggers an automated build and testing process to catch errors quickly, ensuring the codebase stays in a working state.
A CI pipeline typically involves the following tasks:
If one of the steps above fails:
It’s like a regular health check for your project, making it easier to find and fix issues early while speeding up development.
Continuous delivery (CD) picks up where continuous integration ends. While CI is the process to build and test automatically, CD deploys all code changes in a build to the testing or staging environment.
CD makes it possible to release builds to the production environment when needed. Allowing the team to deploy at will, CD effectively reduces time to market.
Before deploying software to production, the CD process includes performing automated system testing, unit testing (including API testing and load testing), and integration testing.
The steps from CI to CD are usually completed automatically, including automated testing at the unit, integration, and system levels. As tests can fail at any level and environment, CI/CD must include a feedback channel to quickly report failures to developers.
Dependent on policies and processes defined by teams, developers may do the following with CI/CD:
Step 1: Before committing changes, developers check to see if the current build succeeded. If not, fix errors before committing new changes.
Step 2: If the current build succeeded, reset the workstation with the build’s configuration.
Step 3: Build and test locally to ensure the update does not break any functionality. If successful, commit new changes.
Step 4: Allow CI to complete with new changes.
Step 5: If the build fails, stop and fix errors on local workstations. Go back to Step 3.
Step 6: If the build passes, continue working on other items.
Read more: Continuous Delivery vs Continuous Deployment: A Comparison
A CI/CD pipeline is a path for delivering a unit of change that starts from development to delivery, usually consists of the following main phases:
Phase 1: Commit
When developers complete a change, they commit the change to the repository.
Phase 2: Build
Source code from the repository is integrated into a build.
Phase 3: Automate tests
Automated tests are run against the build. Test automation is an essential element of any CI/CD pipeline.
Phase 4: Deploy
The built version is delivered to production.
Test automation is a crucial component of any CI/CD pipeline. The benefits of applying CI/CD cannot be realized if there is a lack of automated testing and a low level of test coverage. Teams need to perform automated testing at all levels including unit, integration, and system testing.
Teams also need to apply automation testing for multiple testing types such as functionality, usability, performance, load, stress, and security.
Many software tools are available to support implementing CI/CD practices. These CI/CD tools range from repository management such as Github and Bitbucket, Jenkins for build automation, and Selenium and Katalon Studio for test automation.
Katalon Studio provides a comprehensive set of features for API, Web, and mobile testing. It can be easily integrated into a CI/CD pipeline to handle unit (API services), integration, and system testing.
CI/CD are two DevOps best practices as they tackle the misalignment between developers and the operational team. With the presence of automation, developers can release changes and new features more frequently, while operation teams have better overall stability.