“Delve deeper into the significance of a CI/CD to understand how and why it matters in developing next-gen software products.”
It has been widely seen that Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD) as the most common agile practice rapidly adopted by organizations in the modern business landscape. CI and CD are the core DevOps tactics that focus on the power of automated testing tools and Agile development. No wonder why CI and CD are fundamental to the DevOps Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) to streamline software development processes. As a part of DevOps practices, CI and CD when executed right make the development teams more efficient, processes more productive, and end products more resilient.
CI/CD aims to minimize software development and delivery time period from months or weeks to days or hours. Major stages of CI and CD pipelines include building infrastructure as code, automated testing and product development. Said that, the crucial advantages of devising a solid CI and CD strategy can be experienced throughout an organization where teams can work in collaboration to create synergies to realize the collective business goals. To help you devise a solid CI/CD strategy, this blog will walk you through the advantages of CI and CD in SDLC. Let’s take a look.
1. CI/CD And SDLC – Enhance Cost-Effectiveness And Time Efficiency
Forward-looking organizations can curtail operational costs by adopting a CI and CD model along with an automated testing environment. Fixed costs that are related to developing and debugging the applications get eliminated. With CI and CD in place, automation is embraced and repetitive steps will be eliminated. Automation of test scripts and prompt feedback are possible for quick testing through CI. As a result, ROI also improves in the underlying process as fixed costs related to developing and debugging applications are eliminated. Likewise in the case of CI, CD accelerates the development process, developers can divert their time and efforts to critical and strategic tasks in SDLC.
2. CI/CD And SDLC – Unmatched Reliability, Agility, and Resilience
Enhance the test reliability with CI and CD to make system fault sensitive, and allow systems to conduct accurate tests to provide valuable insights. The efficiency of development teams increases manifold with enhanced test reliability. CI involves small segments of code, and executes iterative changes to provide smooth transitioning. Quick testing allows automation of test scripts along with instant feedback. CD is the logical next step to CI. CD manages automated tests to make testing a continuous process and allows different tests across different stages of SDLC.
3. CI/CD And SDLC – Better Product Quality And Streamlined Processes
CI/CD empowers software companies to become Agile by delivering software products keeping quality as a paramount criterion. Businesses leverage the power of CI and CD pipelines to enhance product quality. CI and CD offer a gamut of advantages over traditional approaches in terms of robust failure detection in SDLC environments. Product quality is increased multifold as CI eliminates errors or bugs at early stages in the development cycle. Developers can continuously monitor the scripts and deploy it to the production environment after thoroughly running a few tests. As a result reduced costs and enhanced product quality amplify the business ROI.
Adopting DevOps Practices Like CI/CD In SDLC, Companies Can Experience
- Faster and robust time-to-market with an edge to compete in the marketplace
- Ability to detect defects faster to minimize non-critical defects from the backlog
- Accelerated pace of innovation as CI and CD foster the culture of innovation-first
- Increased efficiency of QA teams, improved code quality and process efficiency
- Integrated small pieces of code effectively to enhance manageability
- Enhanced test reliability and efficiency that are conducted in the system
- Improved the quality of codes and increased ROI by adopting automation
To summarize, CI and CD have become a necessity for organizations that are looking forward to delivering innovative software products to stay relevant in the market. It has become a necessity to improve the rate of innovation and ensure that every glitch from SDLC is eliminated.
CI and CD strategies are crucial for development teams in this day and age as the teams extensively require a conducive production ecosystem to take operations to the next level. These practices help teams in creating higher quality software, faster and better. In today’s competitive development landscape, right CI/CD strategy provides a sharp competitive edge over the others.
Partner with a DevOps service provider who is well-equipped to deliver cutting-edge solutions that can help you bridge the gap between your development and operations to expedite the pace of your SDLC to realize business goals.