Introduction to CI/CD

CI/CD

CI/CD stands for Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment. Let’s quickly review the two terms individually.

Continuous integration

“Integrate what?”, you may ask yourself. The answer is source code, and making sure code written by various team members is merged into a single default branch as frequently as possible. This is important to avoid feature development in isolation. The longer each team member works in isolation, the bigger the eventual merge is going to be. Big merges are painful to review and come with great uncertainty as to whether everything still works.

To reduce that Big Bang surprise when multiple features are eventually merged into the default branch, automation and in particular automated tests are of the utmost importance. The sooner ...