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Many organizations have adopted Agile and DevOps methodologies to overcome the limitations of the traditional Waterfall development model. In waterfall, testing is traditionally performed at the final stage of the software development process. As a result, when bugs are discovered late, they require extensive rework and strategy adjustments, significantly impacting time-to-market and overall project efficiency.
Some of the common issues with the traditional waterfall model are:
Slow-Release Cycles: As testing was considered as the end of the development cycle, bugs discovered in the last stage adversely affected the release cycle. With this approach, it was very difficult to respond quickly to changing customer needs.
High Failure Rates: Traditional software development lifecycle lacks automation practice. For instance, testing was considered as the last stage of development before going live and was performed manually. Since manual testing didn’t ensure adequate coverage, it led to errors and bugs in the code.
Limited Collaboration: In the traditional software development process, teams work in silos. There wasn’t enough collaboration among software development teams - developers, testers, and other stakeholders. This made it difficult to identify and fix issues.
High Cost: As testing was done in the final stage of development in the Waterfall model, it involves a lot of reworks and rethinking of strategies as bugs were found in the last. Not only does this adversely affect the time to market but also results in high cost.
Limited Agility: The traditional approach was linear and didn’t support the changing customer needs.
What is a continuous integration/ continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline?
The continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline includes a series of steps that are executed to deliver a newer version of the software. The main objective of this pipeline is to improve software delivery via automation. Here, different phrases of software development - development, testing, production, and monitoring are automated to deliver high quality code, faster and more securely.
What is Continuous Integration?
In the continuous integration process, the developers commit their code to central repositories which are managed by version control systems (VCSs) such as Git.
Rather than merging their code to the master branch once their work is complete, the developers need to frequently commit their code to a shared common repository. This modern software development approach avoids bug accumulation for later stages of development.
Whenever a developer commits code to the main repository, the continuous integration pipeline automatically triggers builds, stores artifacts, executes unit tests, and performs code reviews.
What is Continuous Delivery?
Once continuous integration is done, continuous delivery is executed. In this stage, integration tests and regression tests are performed so that new features can be released in an error-free way to the end users. The testing is done in the staging environment which is similar to the production environment. The operations team can now deploy the changes to the production environment.
What is Continuous Deployment?
In CI/CD, CD also refers to the continuous deployment. Here, the code changes are automatically passed to the end users once they pass a series of predefined tests, such as regression tests in the staging environment (similar to production environment). The objective here is to maintain high software quality. In nutshell, application changes carried out by the developer will be live within a few minutes of writing pass with the automated testing.
Continuous Delivery versus Continuous Deployment
Both continuous delivery and continuous deployment are about automating software development. However, the level of automation used differentiates both. In continuous delivery, code automatically moves to a staging environment where testing and quality assurance steps are executed. However, human intervention is required for deployment in the production environment.
In continuous deployment, once the code passes testing, the deployment to production happens automatically without requiring human approval. Saying otherwise, it is a completely automated process when it comes to deployment.
Why is CI/CD pipeline important?
We are living in a digitally enabled world, where organizations need to develop software quickly and efficiently. CI/CD pipeline enables continuous improvement of software as organizations can market new features and enhancements faster than ever before, continuously moving code into production.
What are the Benefits of a CI/CD Pipeline?
Rapid feedback: Continuous integration shortens development cycles, enabling frequent testing and commits. This ensures that issues are quickly identified at runtime.
Continuous Improvements: Here, the focus is on smaller commits. So, more deployment-ready codes are available to deliver continuous innovation.
Cost reduction: Since automation plays a key role in testing and deployment, it reduces the overall workload, helping to lower costs, especially over the long term.
Competitiveness: Incorporating CI/CD pipelines enable organizations to embrace agility. Since they can adopt new features more quickly in their applications, they can easily gain a competitive advantage.
