Continuous integration and continuous delivery are also known as CI/CD. These methodologies help software companies to become more agile by rapid and more reliable delivery. CI/CD helps to reduce the development and delivery time from months or weeks to days and even hours
According to a recent survey, CI/CD is the most valuable agile practice that is adopted by organizations. A theory explains that as quickly as companies move towards adopting the agile practice, the more efficiently bottom lines will work.
CI/CD are two distinct processes
Continuous integration and continuous delivery are considered two distinct phases during the software development life cycle. Continuous integration is a process to build the code frequently and continuous delivery is the next stage after continuous integration that quickly moves the code from development to production environment by using automated techniques.
Challenges to Continuous integration and continuous delivery
CI/CD requires both cultural and technical changes to move towards new automated technologies. If developers are unable to address these challenges separately, then your move can never be paid off according to planning. Following are the elaboration of how these challenges occur and how to solve them.
Cultural change
The focus on integrated a code various times in a day elaborate cultural change for the developer teams. The main focus is to make sure that bugs and security flaws are found and fixed as soon as possible. The more time you check source code, the less time you need to spend on the review you code when some problems occur.
Changes in the code are hard, and frequently checking of code create a big shift for the developer. The customers are asking them to modify the way of writing, testing, and building code. If developers don’t have cultural dependencies in their organization, then continuous integration will never go smoothly.
Technical changes
Continuous integration and continuous delivery are not possible without technical changes in the software industry. CI/CD mainly depends upon automated tools to check the code is integrated into the repository and merged into the main code during the delivery process to customers. If you don’t have automated tools then it is impossible to constantly check-in and delivers code.
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Tips for solving cultural and technical challenges
To cop up with the technical and cultural changes required by CI/CD following things are important to consider;
- Build collaboration and trust among the teams. Unity among team members across the organization helps to cooperate and share the knowledge between the teams. This must have to start at the highest level of organizational management.
- Performance management is encouraged to improve. If the customers want that developers work according to their requirements, then it is required to provide them, feedback, training, support, and tools for the new CI/CD processes
- Consider failure as a learning experience. Use failure as opportunities to improve and learn. Permit your developers to take such type of risks that leads towards growth and innovation.
- Perform everything by using automation. An automated infrastructure based on source code management tools and automated servers help the developers to build, test, and deploy software products reliably and quickly.
This article was written in collaboration with experts from the Buddy
