Novature Tech looks at the CI/CD pipeline as the modern equivalent of a factory for software, or what we call the Modern Software depot. The Modern Software depot not only encompasses CI/CD best practices and the philosophy and prescriptions of DevOps but also includes the tooling, management, and orchestration of it all. Novature Tech provides the tools to plan, build, test, release, operate, automate and secure all software delivery whether an app is cloud-native, classically architected or hosted on a legacy platform.

The main idea with CI is to reduce integration costs by having developers do it more frequently and sooner than they normally would. In practice, a developer will often discover boundary conflicts between new and existing code at the time of integration. If it’s done early and often, the expectation is that resolving these conflicts will be easier and less costly to perform.

Approach

• Testers will need to write automated tests for each new feature, improvement or bug fix.
• Need a continuous integration server that can monitor the main repository and run the tests automatically for every new commits pushed.
• Developers need to merge their changes as often as possible, at least once a day.

Benefits

• Gain Less bugs – get shipped to production as regressions are captured early by the automated tests.
• Building the release is easy as all integration issues have been solved early.
• Less context switching as developers are alerted as soon as they break the build and can work on fixing it before they move to another task.
• Testing costs are reduced drastically –CI server can run hundreds of tests in the matter of seconds.
• QA team spend less time testing and can focus on significant improvements to the quality culture.

Continuous Deployment is actually an extension of CI, in which the software delivery process is automated further to enable easy and confident deployments into production at any time.

A mature continuous delivery process exhibits a codebase that is always deployable. With CD, software release becomes a routine and no frills event without anxiety or urgency.

Approach

• Establish a strong foundation in continuous integration and your test suite needs to cover enough of your codebase.
• Deployments need to be automated. The trigger is still manual but once a deployment is started there shouldn’t be a need for human intervention.
• Development Team will most likely need to embrace feature flags so that incomplete features do not affect customers in production.
• The quality of test suite determines the quality of releases.
• Documentation process to ensure alignment with pace of deployments.
• Feature flags become an inherent part of the process of releasing significant changes to ensure seamless coordination with other departments (Support, Marketing, PR…).

Benefits

• The complexity of deploying software has been taken away. Dev team doesn’t have to spend days preparing for a release anymore.
• Can release more often, thus accelerating the feedback loop with customers.
• There is much less pressure on decisions for small changes, hence encouraging iterating faster.
• Develop faster as there’s no need to pause development for releases. Deployments pipelines are triggered automatically for every change.
• Releases are less risky and easier to fix in case of problem as deployments in small batches of changes.
• Customers see a continuous stream of improvements, and quality increases every day, instead of every month, quarter or year.

DevOps is a software development and delivery process which considers the production of software from end to end. The key benefits are

• Shorter Development Cycles, Faster Innovation towards dynamic business requirements.
• Reduce Implementation Failure, Reflections and Recovery Time.
• Better Communication and Cooperation among the delivery teams.

DevOps takes the Agile model a step further by bringing closer the release and deployment activities to those of development and testing. This means that an agile team on its own is responsible for the development, testing and release of the software they create.

1. Continuous development
2. Continuous Development monitoring
3. Continuous testing
4. Continuous integration
5. Continuous deployment
6. Continuous release
7. Continuous delivery

Testing in DevOps spans the whole software development and delivery lifecycle. Testers are no longer just focusing on functional testing and feature verification. Testers, will also be involved in operations testing, performance testing, basic security testing, as well as being able to monitor and analyze production data and logs.