CI and CD Can Make the Difference for Your Business

Corporate leaders expect development teams to produce innovative, high-quality, highly secure, agile applications that are instantly available on multiple platforms with a seamless user experience.

In this software-centric era, DevOps, continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) — three milestones on the path to organizational improvement — help organizations achieve these goals, surpass competitors and dominate their industry as a leader.

How do we define CI, CD and DevOps?

Continuous integration(CI) is a critical step in automating software delivery pipelines. With continuous integration, developers continuously and automatically integrate code changes. After a developer checks in code, it’s immediately verified by an automated build-and-test process. With continuous integration, developers find and fix issues with their code more quickly, speed up the development process and gain back time for innovation and higher-value tasks.

Continuous delivery(CD) is a process by which software is always in a release-ready state and can be promoted to a production environment wheneverthe organization wants it. To achieve continuous delivery, teams automate the entire delivery pipeline, including testing and even deployment. The result? More frequent, incremental releases with fewer errors. 

DevOps is the cultural transformation inside organizations that aims to break down silos, automate key processes and spark cross-team collaboration so that all stakeholders in the software delivery process are aligned toward the shared objective of delivering quality software rapidly, reliably, consistently and repeatedly.

How do CI/CDand DevOps add value?

In addition to increasing software quality and development speed, CI/CD dramatically improves the efficiency of development teams. CI/CD benefits software development much the same way Ford enhanced auto manufacturing with the introduction of the assembly line. An automated pipeline, based on CI/CD processes, converts the latest software changes into code that has been built, tested and is ready to be deployed. If it’s working efficiently, the assembly line provides feedback on errors in code more quickly, with a “fail fast” mindset – massively reducing the cost of development and delivery.

DevOps, meanwhile, helps organizations thrive in myriad ways:

Enabling Rapid, Continuous Innovation and Faster Time-to-Market

Having shared objectives and a common understanding among development and operation steams enables cross-team collaboration, breaks down siloed behavior and develops a culture of responsibility – improving effectiveness and speeding time-to-market.

Improving Collaboration and Productivity

DevOps (along with CI/CD) creates new opportunities for collaboration, improved productivity, streamlined maintenance and more efficient operations. Organizations spend less time on unplanned work and rework, and significantly more time developing new features and writing new code.

Reducing Risk

By integrating tools and automating testing and other processes, organizations ensure higher quality, fewer errors and better governance and security, while benefiting from faster application development and delivery. More secure applications are built inless time.

Improving Employee Satisfaction and the Ability to Attract and Retain Top Talent

Talented software developers are worth their weight in gold. There simply aren’t enough to fill all of the available jobs, and recruitment is expensive. Attracting gifted developers and keeping them happy is a key business objective for many organizations. With DevOps, new developer onboarding is faster, and itcreates an environment where employees are inspired and motivated, keeping retention high and encouraging them to recommend the company to peers.

Strengthening Brand and Creating Loyal Customers

When an organization innovates continuously and responds quickly to rapidly changing market demands and customer expectations, it becomes a trendsetter – the first to offer new features and capabilities. Excellent service creates loyal customers who are “sticky” and less inclined to switch to a competitor when the next new, shiny app comes along.

Increasing Revenue and Reducing Costs

DevOps can save companies millions of dollars per year in development costs. They innovate more rapidly, with better software delivered quickly.

Increasing Competitive Advantage
DevOps and CI/CD processes sharpen competitive edge through continuous innovation and faster time-to-market. Organizations today must innovate quickly, add a new twist to an old ideaor respond to competitors’ innovations with something similar or better. With DevOps and CI/CD, organizations stay competitive, or even leapfrog ahead.

Success in modern businessdepends onDevOps and CI/CD.

Companies rise and fall and fortunes are won or lost based on whether or not innovation via software development is at the forefront of their business goals. How effectively is an organization utilizing developers? How quickly are they releasing quality application updates and innovative features? Are they meeting the ever-changing needs of customers faster than competitors? It’s clear that agile programming is not enough. Agility without stability is not going to cut it.

Similarly, stability without product quality will not move the needle. It takes speed, agility, stability and quality to get the job done — all possible through a DevOps culture and continuous integration and continuous delivery. Together, they – perhaps better than anything else an organization can do – return clear, quantifiable business value.

We’ve entered a new era of tremendous opportunities. Thriving in this era requires new ways of thinking and working, and of aligning existing teams and scaling up new ones. DevOps, backed by a foundation of CI and CD, drives revenue and saves costs on a massive scale. It’s where digital transformation starts — and where the success of your business begins.

Ready to get started with DevOps, CI and CD? Check out CloudBees – the unconditional leader in enterprise DevOps – and learn more about how the right platform can help your organization.