12 Benefits of CI/CD
Software organizations worldwide have embraced continuous integration, delivery, and deployment – and for good reason.
From reducing time to market to improving the user experience of software, CI/CD offers many advantages.
Releasing software can take a long time, particularly if you’re building, testing, or deploying manually. You also have to manage dependencies, refresh environments, and perform tests consistently.
A single release of your product or service can repeat that process multiple times as you inevitably discover bugs and verify the fixes. Fortunately, there is a better way.
Continuous integration, delivery, and deployment (CI/CD) enables teams to release software more frequently without compromising on quality.
With CI/CD, code changes are shepherded through an automated pipeline that handles the repetitive build, test, and deployment tasks and provides rapid feedback if any step fails.
If you’re wondering whether the benefits of continuous integration, delivery, and deployment are worth exploring or need help convincing your stakeholders, this guide is for you.
Read on to find out what a CI/CD pipeline can do for your organization, highlighting 12 benefits of CI/CD.
In this article:
Faster time to market
One of the key benefits of CI/CD is undoubtedly being able to deliver new features and fixes to your users faster and more often.
Tech giants have led the way with continuous, incremental improvements to their products and services. With many smaller organizations following suit, users’ expectations continue to rise.
Building a great product packed with innovative features is no longer enough. To remain competitive, you need to be able to respond quickly to user feedback and a constantly evolving market. An automated CI/CD pipeline makes it possible to ship improvements weekly, daily, or even hourly so you can stay ahead of the curve.
Better code quality
Testing your code’s behavior is essential in the software release process, but thorough tests can be extremely time-consuming. A central part of any CI/CD pipeline is a series of automated tests run on every build. Although writing automated tests requires time and expertise, it’s an investment that pays dividends.
Automation ensures you perform tests consistently, making the results more reliable. Because automated tests are quicker to run than their manual equivalents, they also make it feasible to test more frequently.
By running your code through automated tests each time you commit a change, you discover bugs earlier and can fix them before other functionality is built on top of them. Over time, automated testing results in higher-quality code, as you’re building on a stable foundation.
Shorter feedback loops
Rapid feedback is a vital part of the DevOps approach. Building and testing your codebase after each commit ensures you’re alerted to any issues your changes have introduced soon after you’ve made them. Getting feedback sooner rather than later reduces the context switching you must do, saving you time and effort.
Similarly, shipping regular updates gives you more immediate feedback on what you’ve built than batching changes up for a significant release every few months. Feeding these insights into a cycle of continuous deployment allows you to see how your changes perform soon after making them. This information means you can keep iterating and tweaking without the loss of context that results from a long delay between coding and release.
Smoother releases
What’s true of shooting hoops or mastering scales also applies to software releases – practice makes perfect. As you build your CI/CD pipeline and release more frequently, you’ll identify the pain points in your current process. You may be able to make refinements like refreshing data in a test environment or reconfiguring parameters before deploying on a particular machine.
Adding automation for builds, tests, environment creation, and deployments makes each step consistent and repeatable. Once you’ve got the basics in place, you can optimize each stage to make your process even more efficient. CI/CD transforms software releases from a significant event that occupies multiple teams for several days into a familiar and predictable occurrence.
Less downtime
Even with improved code quality thanks to automated testing, bugs occasionally sneak their way through to production. A benefit of shipping changes more often is that each production release contains a smaller number of code changes, making it much easier to isolate the cause of an issue. As your commits are smaller, if you decide to roll back the change, you’re also less likely to remove other useful changes with it.
When a hotfix rather than a rollback is the better option, it can be tempting to skip manual testing to save time despite the risk of introducing a new failure to production. With a CI/CD pipeline, running automated tests becomes much easier and faster, reducing the temptation to skip or limit testing.
Reduced risk
Having a shorter time to market doesn’t just help you keep up with the competition. Rapid releases also allow product managers and marketing professionals to engage more closely with the development process.
Testing your new functionality with users early and often – either with test participants in a pre-production environment or with real users in live versions – means you can validate your approach early on. Gone are the days of investing months or even years working on a feature that doesn’t solve your users' problems.
Making releases easier also gives you an opportunity to experiment with alternative designs, either by running A/B tests or comparing results from different deployments.
More efficient development
Continuous integration encourages you to commit code changes more frequently – at least once daily as a rule of thumb. This regularity ensures your whole team builds on the same foundation, resulting in smaller code reviews and making it easier to integrate changes.
Working with smaller increments means that code reviewers have less to comprehend. Smaller commits also tend to produce more specific commit messages, so you can easily see how the logic progresses.
Finally, if something needs to be changed before you merge a commit, there is less code to rewrite and fewer conflicts to resolve.
Opportunities for creativity
Automating repetitive tasks frees up more time for developers to explore and innovate. Instead of following manual test scripts, QA engineers can use their creative skills to identify new types of failure so you can improve your automated test coverage.
Rather than manually managing releases, operations teams can use the data collected by the CI server to fine-tune the deployment process and further amplify the benefits of CI/CD automation.
More exciting work also improves job satisfaction and staff retention, attracting other talented individuals to join your team. In turn, this benefits your organization, product, users, and, ultimately, bottom line.
Collaboration and communication
Building a CI/CD pipeline requires collaboration between developers and operations teams. Breaking down the silos between them is the beginning of a virtuous circle.
A CI/CD pipeline allows the many specialists involved in building a product – from security experts to marketing teams – to gain better visibility into the software development process and collaborate more closely.
Many of the CI/CD tools available to help manage your build also make it easier for non-developers to see what is going on. At the same time, access to staging environments lets them engage with and provide feedback on what is being built.
Sharing release details, usage metrics, and experiment results opens the door to more communication between teams, creating more opportunities for innovation.
Non-functional requirement testing
CI/CD makes it easier to perform security, accessibility, and other non-functional tests regularly. By deploying changes automatically to dedicated testing environments, you can run the relevant checks as part of every pipeline. Depending on your industry, this can be a game-changer for ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements.
If performance is a concern, collecting the results of automated stress, load, soak, and other tests will help you ensure your product or service continues to perform within your accepted limits.
Efficient use of infrastructure
Continuous delivery and deployment create ideal opportunities for infrastructure-as-code. Instead of manually managing individual servers, you can script their configuration and store it in version control so that new environments can be brought online quickly without the risk of inadvertent changes and inconsistencies.
Taking an infrastructure-as-code approach means you can scale your build farm to meet demand and free up resources when they are no longer needed, using them instead for other tasks. As a result, you can reduce costs while ensuring you deliver the desired level of service.
Measurable progress
Many tools available to support automated CI/CD also capture metrics from the process. This information includes everything from build times to test coverage and defect rates to fix times.
Armed with this data, you can identify areas that might need attention so you can keep improving your pipeline. Slower builds may indicate a need to increase capacity, while an increase in the mean time to resolution (MTTR) might be a sign of a process or cultural issue.
Metrics can also provide reasons to celebrate. Consistently extending your code’s test coverage, reducing your defect rate, or increasing your release frequency all belong on the team’s collective brag sheet as signs of a great working culture. Demonstrating how your CI/CD workflow is supporting your organization’s goals is yet another advantage of the practice.
Wrapping up
The benefits of an automated CI/CD pipeline range from practical considerations like code quality and rapid bug fixes to supporting your business goals by ensuring you’re building the right thing for your users.
Despite the term DevOps suggesting a focus on developer and operations teams, building a CI/CD process enables collaboration across multiple functions. By streamlining the steps to release your product, you’ll get more insights into how your product is used and free up individuals to innovate more.