Software developers are some of the most impressive and busy professionals today. Throughout the digital revolution, coders are responsible for building up all these websites, programs, and automation features. Whether you’re adding a new feature to your existing software or starting a brand new development process, you’ll need new code and a software team dedicated to improving the workflow. Usually, this involves a large team that could be working from many different locations and at different paces.
Whenever you’re working on any project, the best practice is to be sure everyone is on the same page. Otherwise, things can quickly go off the rails and you’ll end up with a project that isn’t very cohesive. This is especially important when you’re developing software programming. For this reason, coders rely on continuous integration and deployment methods as they work on new code or code changes.
These programs help keep the mainline intact by continuously checking that everything is operating well together. This automatic process is a great gauge for your software developers and a benefit to your company overall. Let’s take a look at some more details and how you can implement these techniques in your enterprise.
What is continuous integration/continuous deployment?
As a regular element to software development, continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) is the process of integrating code from different developers throughout the process of a software build. This process is ongoing and happens automatically so you can be sure integration is present throughout your coding. Think of it as a cycle that is constantly refreshing and checking in.
As you code and build something, continuous integration will do a unit test and then move forward if everything aligns with the main branch. Once your code change has been released, it will be officially put into practice for operation. Think of CI and CD as a review process to guarantee individual developers are all working toward a unified final project.
How does this benefit your software development?
Utilizing CI and CD has huge benefits for your overall enterprise. For one, it saves you time. Because the automated build is checking itself on a continuous loop, you’ll be able to catch problems right away rather than having to come back to them.
You’ll also save money by not needed extra oversight when your coding system already includes that. Release software faster because of better communication between developers on the CI servers. The ultimate benefit of CI and CD is the fact that your end product will be more streamlined and connected. Enjoy a great finished product that will stand the test of time and operate more efficiently.
Understand the eight steps of continuous integration and deployment.
When you are implementing continuous integration and deployment, there are steps to the overall loop. You start by planning what you need to fix. Then, your coding team will go to work on their individual sections of code to address the problem. Next is the build stage where each coder will submit their work to compile the application.
Now it is time for the testers to check your work. This is the step of continuous integration where you see how functional and usable that new code is. Once everything is approved, code will be released to merge with current software, and then the new program is deployed. The last two steps include operating the code in the production ecosystem and monitoring how everything does.
This overall process is a continuous loop that operates on a regular basis in less time than you would expect. Set up this implementation so the next time you go to do a new build, you’ll be ready to streamline the process.
