Why is Continuous Integration and Validation a must for accelerated Product Development?

Continuous Integration

Continuous Integration may be a process that development teams must adopt because it encourages developers to push new code changes as and once they write them. This process is meant to trigger automatic code integration within the main codebase. rather than developing in isolation then integrating them at end of the event cycle, if an endless integration process is followed, the code integrations are often done on the fly as and when there’s a replacement code. the continuous integration process will allow developers to integrate and test their code multiple times throughout the day.

Organizations must remember that this process of integration alone won’t guarantee the standard of code or its functionality. But enhancing this may address them and solve those issues. Nevertheless, in many organizations, build integration is time-consuming as manual processes are wont to validate adherence to coding standards. Moreover, new code doesn’t introduce new bugs or break existing functionality. Hence, build automation during this area is required. Build automation successfully and failure criteria will lead us to the subsequent major phase, which is continuous validation.

Continuous Validation

Continuous validation covers white box testing and recorder testing followed by additional validation criteria as per the scope of verification and validation stages. to make sure such white box and black-box tests, optimal validation of the success of a selected build would wish an efficient test framework to deal with failure areas, pinpoint the code check-ins that led to failures and trace/debug mechanisms that assist development teams in fixing issues. Hence, continuous validation would help address test validation criteria at a rapid pace through parallel test methodologies in an agile world.

Another major risk mitigated by implementing continuous validation is that testing teams receive only stable builds after sanity testing through automation. this permits testing teams to perform effective testing on a stable build.

So, the top goal of continuous integration is to seamlessly integrate the old code with new code, which provides us a stable build with enhanced features without integration and code quality issues. the continual integration process should be simple and seamless in everyday development workflow because it will reduce integration costs and responds to bugs early. this could make the CI system robust, automated, and fast while encouraging developers for frequent code integrations.

The top continuous integration tools that are available today within the market are Jenkins, Team City, Travis, Go CD, Bamboo, GitLab CI, Circle CI, and Codeship. Each of those tools has specific advantages and pricing options, which may be wont to determine the requirements of a corporation.

Continuous Delivery

Continuous delivery is that the extension of continuous integration. Its focus is to automate the software delivery process in order that teams can easily deploy code into the specified environments at any given time. Continuous delivery ensures high code quality because it comes once continuous integration is completed. Teams got to combine continuous delivery with continuous integration alongside continuous testing. this may give developers confidence and immediate insight into ways during which a minor code change behaves, once it’s committed.

Continuous delivery Process ImageImplementing continuous integration and continuous delivery practice require a mix of technical and organizational improvements to be effective. Let’s mention the technology side. Continuous delivery leans heavily on the deployment of pipelines to automate the testing and deployment process. this may ensure delivery of the newly built code from development to QA for continuous and automatic testing, which is pre-configured. A reliable continuous integration setup may be a prerequisite to implementing continuous delivery.

As per the organizational structure, the continual delivery pipeline can reach other environments like staging or pre-production where continuous automated tests run on alpha or beta releases before they will be deployed in production. Continuous delivery is attractive because it automates the steps between checking code into the repository and provides absolute confidence in releasing well-tested, functional builds to your production infrastructure.

Continuous Integration – Continuous Delivery Workflow

In general, the implementation of continuous integration in development and staging environments is suggested.  At some places, a manual review is required with approvals for production deployment. For a production environment, we should always confirm it happens when key stakeholders within the development team are available for support and must be planned during low-traffic periods. so as to form sure that developers are ready to check ways during which their new code changes are behaving, there should be an automatic process for any development and testing environments.

Continuous delivery – deployment of pipeline

As discussed, CI-CD doesn’t just mean code integration and deployment. It also covers code coverage tests, code quality analysis, running the sanity test suite, and publishing reports. All are often integrated into one pipeline, which completes a full life cycle for continuous integration, continuous validation, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment of applications on-premise, public, private or hybrid clouds.

Need some help in incorporating CI/CD pipeline in your project? Get in touch with a TestUnity expert today. We provide the testing services on-demand, serve with projects of any scale, and are ready to start with a few days’ advance notice. Choose to team up with a QA services provider like TestUnity. Our team of testing experts specializes in QA and have years of experience implementing tests with different testing software. 

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