{"id":6228,"date":"2023-07-17T08:44:10","date_gmt":"2023-07-17T13:44:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thebitbang.company\/?p=6228"},"modified":"2023-07-17T11:52:01","modified_gmt":"2023-07-17T16:52:01","slug":"que-es-ci-cd-y-por-que-es-importante","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thebitbang.company\/en\/2023\/07\/que-es-ci-cd-y-por-que-es-importante\/","title":{"rendered":"What is CI\/CD and why is important the adoption of a DevOps culture"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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\nIntroduction<\/strong><\/h2>\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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The goal of this post is to share with you some ideas and experiences we\u2019ve been collecting through the years working with customers and partners to deliver software that meets their business requirements on time.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Overcoming Bottlenecks and Embracing DevOps for Agile Software Development<\/strong><\/h2><\/h2>\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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<\/p>

The application of agile principles to develop software makes possible the incremental delivery of new features to the customers. But at some point we face bottlenecks to move these new features into production environments due the following reasons:<\/p>

  1. Missing dependencies when code is being prepared for production<\/li>
  2. Environment configuration issues for each stage (dev, staging\/nonprod or production)<\/li>
  3. Issues merging changes into the source code repository<\/li>
  4. Bugs not detected on time by developers or testers<\/li><\/ol>

    When these problems come up we start to batch up the changes to be moved to each stage (production stage is the most common one) this ends up in infrequent releases and removes the opportunity to receive feedback from users quickly.<\/p>

    Organizations could take an approach to implement more manual processes and constant collaboration between teams, but at some point this is going to reduce productivity and generate burnout in team members due the amount of time and meetings they will have to achieve results. At the end of the day automating the build, test and deployment steps helps to get the features done efficiently and quickly.<\/p>

    The point is that apply a DevOps culture at the beginning could be really hard but there is an important quote related to this:<\/p>

    \u201cDevOps takes the view that if something is painful, you should do it more often\u201d<\/em><\/p>

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    A brief context about DevOps and CI\/CD<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<\/h3>\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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    <\/p>

    Let\u2019s start by defining what CI\/CD<\/a> is. Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment\/Delivery (CD) are practices that automate the steps that must be performed to release new versions of software with the following advantages:<\/p>

    1. The software delivery to the clients can be achieved faster and efficiently<\/li>
    2. Reduce the time to publish the applications to the production environment<\/li>
    3. The code quality can be improved by including automatic tests and static code analysis tools<\/li><\/ol>

      But, how does this happen?<\/strong><\/h1>

      Continuous Integration reduces the risk of integration issues and improves code quality. Developers commit their changes to the codebase regularly and check whether the codebase still works when other developers are contributing. More than a technical component, Continuous Integration is a cultural component where developers learn good practices to integrate their changes frequently.<\/p>

      Therefore, we have integrated GitFlow in our software development workflow. It has helped us to apply good practices to work collectively, keep the history of our repositories consistent and reduce significantly the risk of integration issues and bugs introduction.<\/p>

      These are some tools you need to apply the principles of CI:<\/strong><\/p>

      1. A source or version control system to store your codebase<\/li>
      2. Automated build scripts<\/li>
      3. Automated tests<\/li>
      4. Infrastructure (Virtual Machines) to run your tests and builds<\/li><\/ol>

        A CI server has the following missions:<\/strong><\/p>

        1. Monitor your repository looking for changes published by developers<\/li>
        2. Run automated tests, if tests don\u2019t pass the changes won\u2019t be merged into the code base<\/li><\/ol>

          Is continuous delivery the next step?<\/h1>

          After all steps of Continuous Integration have been completed, Continuous Delivery takes place. This practice automates some of the steps required to deliver our solutions to the production environment.<\/p>

          Continuous delivery integrates a set of processes, tools and a culture of collaboration and continuous feedback to accomplish the mission. A change of mentality of your team is important to:<\/p>

          1. Understand that your new feature is not done when the other team takes care of it. The feature is done when it has been released in production<\/li>
          2. Create practices to better understand what is needed to deliver new features to users through the software development lifecycle<\/li>
          3. Maintaining open communication with other teams, collaboration and feedback is very important<\/li><\/ol>

            Implementing a pipeline requires the identification of pain points and bottlenecks that could affect the delivery process, and implementing practices to detect bugs early is relevant. After you have identified these items, think about which ones can be automated (it is not mandatory to automate all of them), it is\u00a0very very\u00a0<\/strong>relevant to manage some scenarios manually. This is what we call manual gates, some of them might be questionable, whereas some could be legitimate.<\/p>

            But what is a legitimate or questionable scenario?<\/h2>

            Legitimate scenario:<\/strong><\/p>