CI/CD Pipelines for Optimizing Software Development Workflow

CI/CD pipelines and test environments are an important part of software engineering. They’re a part of the development workflow that takes us from writing code to having systems in the hands of users. In this lesson, we’re going to look at what the terms mean and how we can use these ideas in our projects.

What’s a CI/CD pipeline?

Let’s start with defining the terms:

• CI stands for continuous integration: Integration is where we take individual software components and join them together to make a whole. CI means we do this all the time as we write new code.

• CD stands for either continuous delivery or continuous deployment: We’ll cover the difference later, but in both cases, the idea is that we’re taking the latest and greatest version of our integrated software and delivering it to a stakeholder. The goal of continuous delivery is that we can, if we want to, deploy every single code change to production with a single click of a button.