A Step-by-Step Guide to CI/CD | When you are building something, you need to work together with your team. If you’re constructing a new house, for example, you may have one technician working on the plumbing and another person handling the electrics. Those two individuals may have different tasks, but they can’t work effectively without consulting each other. Otherwise, you may cross electrical wires with your pipes and that could cause serious complications for the homeowner. Well, it is exactly the same way for software development and coding.
If you are working on a new software program or even making a small code change, you need oversight and the ability to communicate between different development teams. This aids your overall workflow and helps guarantee a quality end product. Continuous integration and continuous delivery use automation to help guarantee the deployment of all-new software programs is unified and usable. Implementing these systems for your software development team is essential for your overall enterprise. Here is a step-by-step guide to integration and delivery so you can get started with these methods right away.
What is continuous integration and delivery?
Working within any operation means you need oversight on certain projects. Continuous integration and continuous delivery, or CI/CD for short, acts as this oversight for production environments. Through continuous testing, you can guarantee the different elements of each code will work together for your software. CI and CD have been vital parts of software development for decades. These automatic processes are a great way to create better software and work with continuous deployment.
Understand the steps of continuous integration and delivery.
As you get ready to implement CI technology, it’s helpful to understand how it truly works. The automated process involves eight steps before new code is officially in effect across your software. Let’s break down those steps for a moment.
- Plan. Before you can do anything, you have to have a plan and know what you’re developing in the first place. Are you creating new code, rewriting an old script, or improving a set of practices? Once you know the feature branch you’re working on, you can move forward with your development teams.
- Code. This is the step where your operations team actually creates the code for the new software. Each expert will have a specific piece of the puzzle they are working on.
- Build. Think of this step as bringing the puzzle pieces together. Once each coder has completed their section, the build involves bringing them together in a compiled application.
- Test. This is the big step within CI. Automated testing checks the functionality and usability of these pieces of code. In addition to seeing the usability, the test phase will also see how compatible the new code is with existing software programs. This step is the gateway that decides if your piece of code moves forward or gets sent back to the developer for improvements.
- Release. If approved, the new application will be sent to merge with the existing software. This is how it prepares for automatic release.
- Deploy. This step is fairly straightforward. When you deploy your developments, they will officially become a part of your production.
- Operate. You’ve done your part, now it’s time for the new code to operate within the master branch of your software.
- Monitor. Once your code is implemented and operating, there may still be some bugs and issues to figure out along the way. Get continuous feedback by monitoring the software and documenting problems that may arise. If you do find issues, you’ll start the whole cycle over again by planning how you’ll fix them and work on coding new solutions.
