According to a survey, 83% of developers said that they are releasing code faster thanks to CI/CD and DevOps. Not only that, 60% of developers are deploying once or even multiple times a day. What’s even more surprising is the fact that only 45% of developers were deploying once or twice a day, which translates into a 15% increase in a year.
Due to this, 21% of developers shared that their teams have added continuous integration to the development process while 15% said that their teams are more focused on continuous delivery. This clearly shows the growing adoption and popularity of continuous integration and continuous delivery.
With the popularity of cloud-native architecture growing, it has accelerated the adoption of microservices. Yes, microservices offer tons of advantages such as improved scalability and security, resilient applications and better fault isolation capabilities but it can also disrupt your continuous integration and continuous delivery pipeline.
Whenever a new change or practice is implemented in your DevOps, it can make matters worse. This forces the IT team to recalibrate their priorities. If you want to succeed with continuous integration and continuous delivery, you should be aware of the success factors. That is exactly what you will learn after reading this article.
In this article, you will learn about six important factors you should consider when implementing continuous integration in your organization.
6 Key Factors To Succeed With Continuous Integration
Here are six key factors that will help you succeed at continuous integration.
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Version and Source Control
Version and source control is critical for successful continuous integration. To ensure that development teams should adopt a trunk-based development model. It is basically a source control branching model that enables developers to collaborate on a single branch of code with vps singapore. The software can be broken down into multiple branches (features) and each branch should not take mo0re than a day to complete.
In order to develop features so quickly, developers will have to use automation for both testing and development purposes. From automating builds to launching automated tests, these events will be executed whenever a developer adds new code to the trunk. This will not only save a lot of time but also saves resources spent on testing. Best of all, you can conduct different types of testing such as unit testing, user acceptance testing and integration testing.
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Create Clean Code
If there is one success factor that trumps all others when it comes to continuous integration, it is writing clean code. When you write clean code, you start maintaining a code repository. It is important to create a branching and merging strategy that everyone agrees to. This strategy should cover everything from rules for code versioning, build scripts and building dependencies. You should also create a report that tracks changes your developers have made to different versions of the code.
There should also be a method to store different versions of newer releases. Moreover, your static code analysis should have a software bill of material (SBOM) as well as common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVE). This will give you a clear picture and provide better control over your code.
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Independent Microservices
With software developers moving away from monolithic software development, the focus is slowly but surely shifting towards continuous integration and independent microservices. Microservices can not only help you be agile and bring products faster to the market but are also an ideal choice for small and focused development teams. At its core, a microservices is nothing but a container registry and image build. You need dedicated server hosting to run these microservices as it requires more power.
Yes, it still requires a code repository for code management purposes as well as steps for code scanning but can save you from the hassle of SBOM, CVE and branching and merging. The primary focus for continuous integration will be on container version management and the creation of a logical version of applications based on the impact of service. This will be a big departure from the old school and traditional focus areas of continuous integration and could take some time for businesses to get used to it.
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Streamline Source Code Control Management Processes
The first thing you need to do to increase your chances of success with continuous integration is to streamline your source code control management processes. Here are some of the steps you can take to achieve this goal.
- Define and implement a continuous implementation strategy
- Oversee everyone is following the baseline and automated build creation process on a consistent basis
- Whenever you are adding new code to the code repository, pass it through automated tests
- As soon as you identify issues in your build or think that it is broken, repair and fix the issues as quickly as possible
- Create custom scripts and tests for every new story you want to implement.
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Peer Review
Continuous integration success stems from source software. This includes source code management and your peer review process. The more efficient your source code management and peer review process might be, the easier it would be for you to succeed with continuous integration. Make sure that your unit tests are already set up as soon as your code compilation process is completed. You should also have a clearly defined marketing framework when your code is in the testing process.
If your integration testing is backed by a proven framework, your development team will be able to ensure continuous delivery and continuous deployment at the same time.
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Leverage Automation
A good continuous integration system takes advantage of automation. Whether it is code change input checking, performing source code scanning or managing source code versions, these systems rely heavily on automation for all these tasks. Some continuous integration systems take things to the next level by automating container creation, container scanning, functional testing and new build verification and more.
Make sure that your continuous integration system has a unified dashboard and notification alert system in place to keep all the stakeholders informed about progress on continuous integration processes. Invest in building a resilient and fault-tolerant continuous integration system so that your stakeholders can rely on it.
Which of these factors helped you succeed at continuous integration? Share it with us in the comments section below.
