Incorporating CI/CD and DevOps into your organization’s processes offers numerous advantages.
In this blog, we share three key benefits of embracing CI/CD and DevOps: faster software development, higher-quality output, and enhanced collaboration.
Challenges in data management and software development
Over the last decade, many organizations have started adopting DevOps to expedite better software delivery. Automation plays a critical role in achieving success within a DevOps framework, and CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous delivery) is one essential application of automation.
CI/CD automates software development workflows, reducing manual tasks and enabling teams to deliver software to customers quickly.
With developers accelerating their coding and shipping processes, increased multi-cloud adoption, and the significant workplace changes brought about by COVID-19, organizations and software teams are continuously exploring innovative methods to enhance their software delivery and collaboration in a distributed work environment.
By utilizing an automated CI/CD platform, organizations can see a 36% increase in the number of merged pull requests and reduce the time to merge by 33%.
Additionally, automating repetitive tasks like environment setups, data manipulation UIs, or application deployment scripting can dramatically boost performance: 27% better in open-source projects and 43% better at work.
In this context, let’s explore three ways organizations can benefit from investing in CI/CD and DevOps to build higher-quality software faster and facilitate more effective collaboration.
1. Ensure processes are consistent
CI/CD automation is essential to DevOps practices. It helps teams deliver code to production faster by minimizing manual tasks and ensuring consistency and repeatability in the software development lifecycle (SDLC).
In enterprise environments, CI/CD pipelines automate the entire SDLC—from builds and testing to delivery—systematizing software development and ensuring consistency at every stage.
This automation allows organizations to deliver software more quickly while developers focus on more critical tasks, free from the risk of human error associated with repetitive and time-consuming activities.
A cultural aspect is also critical to successful CI/CD practices. Instead of deploying significant code changes that require extensive integration and testing, CI/CD encourages developers to commit smaller changes more frequently. This approach makes it easier to integrate, test, and deploy updates, leading to quicker, more consistent software releases. When paired with automated CI/CD pipelines, this cultural shift helps organizations consistently deliver high-quality software with fewer issues.
2. Ship more secure software
Developers understand the importance of testing their code before release. Regular testing throughout the SDLC helps identify bugs, security vulnerabilities, and other issues early, making them easier to address and reducing downstream impacts on the software supply chain.
However, developers often prioritize building new code over testing existing code. CI/CD addresses this by automating tests and providing a consistent feedback loop, which helps produce high-velocity, bug-free code.
Organizations investing in CI/CD must identify critical testing points in their SDLC and design a comprehensive testing suite to ensure all shipped code is secure. Many CI/CD platforms offer prebuilt tests, but organizations must tailor their testing strategies to their specific needs, including a mix of custom unit tests, integration tests, performance tests and security tests.
The aim of an automated testing suite is to maintain a stable, secure, and release-ready codebase. Incorporating code reviews and approvals into a CI/CD workflow improves code quality, encourages collaboration through integrated development environments or pair programming, and helps developers make better commits.
Tools like logs, visual workflow builders, and integrated development tools simplify troubleshooting, understanding complex workflows, and sharing status updates when builds fail.
Top-performing CI/CD pipelines incorporate security checks for code and permissions and provide an audit trail for failures, security breaches, and noncompliance events. Some CI/CD pipelines even automate the creation of release notes, documenting changes and security updates for customers.
3. Break down silos for better collaboration
In DevOps, everyone is responsible for product success, with collaboration across the SDLC at its cultural core.
A well-designed CI/CD pipeline encourages cross-team collaboration by reducing manual tasks, enabling developers to focus on high-value software features and updates.
A GitHub survey revealed that developers had an 82% chance of having a good day when free from interruptions, compared to just 7% when facing constant disruptions.
As teams share tools and automation supports consistency, reliability, and efficiency, organizations can more easily discover and troubleshoot problems. CI/CD aids in breaking down barriers and removing silos by establishing real-time feedback loops that flag issues for immediate troubleshooting.
This approach fosters teamwork among development, IT, and operations, leading to proactive planning and real-time problem-solving.
Key takeaways
As more organizations embrace DevOps, there’s a growing push to design and implement CI/CD pipelines for faster, higher-quality software delivery.
Successful CI/CD implementations ensure consistent end products, enhance application security and promote collaboration and communication among teams. Getting CI/CD right involves adopting the best tools, embracing a DevOps culture, and strategically planning the SDLC to enable developers to concentrate on what they do best: building great code.
An IDP (Internal development portal) helps ensure consistency by incorporating all the best CI/CD practices.
Adopting an IDP (such as Calibo‘s) presents a transformative opportunity for optimising development processes and enhancing productivity within organizations. By standardising the approach to software development, particularly in the management of CI/CD pipelines, IDPs streamline the deployment of changes across projects and provide standard metrics that, without using IDPs, would need to be embedded in each pipeline individually to ensure proper instrumentation.
This standardization accelerates the implementation of improvements and fosters a culture of continuous enhancement.
Through IDPs, organizations can effectively navigate the complexities of modern software development at scale, achieving significant time savings, increased development velocity, and reduced your time-to-market.
As the digital landscape continues to evolve, embracing IDPs emerges as a strategic imperative for organizations seeking to remain competitive and agile in today’s dynamic market.
If you want to know more about how an IDP, (such as Calibo), can unlock the true potential of your CI/CD pipelines and boost productivity, read this blog to learn more.
