Modeling Integrations and Deployment Pipelines

The terms Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) are both widely being used in software engineering: CI as the adoption of agile principles; CD as a combination of agile methodology techniques and a high-quality delivery process.

Whereas CI addresses building a software product from the contributions of single members of a development team in a controlled though lean way, the goal of CD is validation of every change, preferably in an automated way, so that it is potentially shippable.

We at InfoBeans follow the CI-CD methodology for our clients to give them a streamlined automated experience. Earlier, our clients faced problems such as time lag in detecting any bug/defect with each build, code being prone to defects as deployed manually etc.

Hence, as a remedy, InfoBeans proactively proposed to automate all the steps from code building to deployment which resulted in adopting an automated deployment pipeline to quickly and reliably release software into production.

In one such implementation, we automated the testing process and the execution time reduced from around four hrs per functionality to 0.5hrs for entire application along with report generation. Similarly, implementing continuous deployment for the same customer, execution time reduced from five hours to nearly less than ten mins including backup, processing, migration, providing permissions (if any) etc.

Continuous deployment means continuously improving. That’s why software development is moving towards continuity. The recent emphasis on continuous integration, built-in testing, constant monitoring and analytics feedback all point toward an overall trend in the software industry of increasing the ability to react.

Continuous integration and deployment as a practice is so broad, a single blog post can’t do it justice. Each team’s recipe varies based on their existing tech stack, customers’ needs, and team culture.

The important thing is to start somewhere and keep iterating.

Continuous improvement for the win!