The Collaboration becomes a major challenge with a team using miscellaneous tools for the purpose of building, testing, and deployment and monitoring a software project. This may cause the rise of several critical issues which includes- Lack of end-to-end visibility into pipeline; inefficient team collaboration; lack of traceability of artifacts; disconnected workflows; software related issues; and inadequate governance. This has been observed that usually teams automate their DevOps pipeline partially with point to point integrations. This may cause the enhancement of the pace of one team but as other teams haven’t automated their workflows, making it hard for them to compliment the pace of the team automated their workflows. This way accelerating development may not be help you meeting your goals.
In the past two decades, IT decision makers have started recognizing the advantages of DevOps and realizing the benefits offered by them and this way in the recent past DevOps have been gaining immense popularity in the IT sector. The scope of automation and aided by cross-departmental association, the software development have been set by the storm with the help of DevOps. What driving this steady growth of software is the modern DevOps pipeline that mixes the power of automation with the cross-team collaboration in order to make faster and much smoother way to the never before release of hot off the presses versions of the most popular applications. But, despite the achievements of DevOps in meeting the mainstream lingo in the software sector, the different concept including the continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery/deployment (CD) pipeline are often not defined appropriately.
In most of the companies, developers work on coding in an isolated manner in separate code branches, which seems to be fostering individual productivity of developers but simultaneously makes team productivity suffering. To integrate them together makes them delivering benefits which are hard to obtain in isolated mode of working.
- The Challenge gets bigger if you don’t continuously integrate:Merging codes is a challenging and time taking task and most of the development teams ironically merge their codes way before delivering application to integration testers that causes enhancement the complexity.This affects the efficiency directly. Development teams generally impose the responsibility of successful integration and quality assurance solely on the quality assurance teams. This prove to be the perfect reason for multiple issues such as delay in project completion, project budget deficit skyrocket, decline in team morale and motivation, failure to organizational goals and commitments, and it is causing a huge financial loss due to non-budgeted and non-scheduled IT work.
- Trunk based development helps you integrating efficiently: Trunk based development combines with continuous integration and test automation and is a source-control branching model that enables Continuous Integration by extending Continuous Delivery. Trunk is helpful in satisfying the core requirement of continuous integration, which ensures that codebase is constantly releasable on demand and helps realizing Continuous Delivery.
- Continuous Integration helps in building deployable codes: Continuous integration with daily check-ins enhances possibilities for a team to build deployable codes without disrupting continuous integration and continuous delivery frameworks.
- Fault Isolation: It stands for the practice of system designing in a way that the negative outcomes must be limited in scope during occurrence of an error. The potential of damage can be easily be reduced by limiting the scope of problems and helps making system easily maintainable. Making your system compatible with CI/CD ensures the faster detection and easy implementation of fault isolations. Fault isolation is a combination of system monitoring, identification whenever fault occurs and triggering the location of the fault. This limit the consequences of the bugs appear in the application. By this sudden breakdown and so many other critical issues can also be prevented and it enhances the ability of isolating the problem before any damage caused to the entire system.
- More Test Reliability: Using Continuous Integration improves test reliability with due to bite-size and other specific changes introduced to the system, enabling system for conducting more accurate negative and positive tests. Within continuous integration/delivery, test reliability can be considered as Continuous Reliability also. Continuous merging and releasing new products and features throughout the whole process, with the surety of quality being the top priority, assures stakeholders that their investment is worthwhile.
- Customer Satisfaction: The advantages of CI/CD are not limited to technical performance but are also about enhance the organization scope. The initial stage of a new customer testing the product is a make-or-break-it situation. So, cashing in the first impression is the key to turning up new customer into a satisfied client. The customers can be kept happy and satisfied with the faster turnarounds of new features and problem solving capacity. Using an integrating approach keeps you product up-to-date with the advanced technology and permits you to attain the trust of new customers who will pick you from all the competitors on the basis of word-of-mouth and positive reviews. As the customers are the main promoters of the product so, what they say has to be taken into high consideration as whether the feedback is positive or negative; it always leads to the improvements in usability and overall client satisfaction.
- Increases team transparency and accountability: CI/CD is an effective mean of getting constant feedback not only from the clients or users but also from the own team. This helps enhancing the transparency regarding problems in the team and motivates responsible accountability among the members. CI is majorly focused on the development team, so the feedback from this part of the pipeline has a huge impact on failures, merging problem and architectural setbacks. CI ensures rapid feedback that allows you to make your product even better in a steady and constant manner.
- Helps Reducing Costs: Automation in the integration pipeline is helpful in reducing the errors usually occur during multiple repetitive steps of CI and CD. So, it can be proved time and cost efficient as it has the ability to catch the error quickly.
- Easy Maintenance and Updates: These two are the essential components of making of a new product. Ensuring maintenance is a great way to make system efficient and this doesn’t let the entire system get down at once which helps updating the system whenever there is a possibility of deployment issues.
The more integrated the pipeline steps are automated, the enhanced and faster quality release can be accomplished in the system.
