Continuous integration is a method where the work each developer on a project does in a day is merged with that of the other developers on the project into one mainline. This process occurs multiple times a day. Here are six ways continuous integration can benefit your business.
1. Higher Performance and More Reliable Delivery
Continuous integration and continuous delivery, or CICD tools, can vastly improve the performance and reliability of your delivery cycles. This is a result of many of the other benefits afforded by continuous integration. On the consumer side, your end-users will receive updates and enhancements more quickly and will be able to use them more quickly and effectively. On the development and production side, your ability to produce these updates will be higher-performing and will likely involve fewer bugs and issues affecting your product’s effectiveness.
2. Reduced Need For Manual Tasks
Continuous integration can greatly reduce the need for you or your developers to perform many tasks manually. You can standardize and automate many of your processes, workflows and individual tasks. This ability will help you reduce the risk of human error affecting your deployments or causing issues. Your team will also be able to more effectively use the time they gain back from not needing to perform repetitive tasks each day. Instead, they can focus on higher-value work, such as strategizing, brainstorming and testing new ideas.
3. Reduced Costs
Costs will be reduced because there will be both less downtime between each release and less risk of outages or errors that will take time away from development work and slow down development and production. You also won’t need to deploy additional resources to resolve errors, bugs, outages and other issues. Continuous integration can be used in tandem with continuous delivery to further reduce costs. You can automate your deployments to various environments, such as testing and production, which can speed up development and reduce downtime.
4. Faster, Continuous Delivery
Continuous integration paired with continuous delivery means your customers will likely be overall happier and able to use your products sooner and in the most up-to-date versions possible at all times. This will be a huge benefit to your organization as a whole, due to the fact that your customers are more likely to be satisfied by the availability and reliability of your products. You’ll also be able to push products to market much more quickly and efficiently, without sacrificing any of the quality of your products, which can help you gain a competitive edge in your industry.
5. Shorter Project Lifecycles
The shorter project lifecycle and delivery and production cycles provided by continuous integration allow you to complete projects in smaller amounts of time. You can use this very effectively on projects related to pre-existing products. This is because you can update code, test it and deploy it much more quickly, allowing you to update smaller products and projects in a far shorter amount of time. By contrast, when you have a large, new product and related project, you may need to take more time to fine-tune the code before you release it.
6. Quickly Identifying And Resolving Issues
When you incorporate continuous integration into your workflows and processes, your developers can identify issues such as bugs and code errors much more quickly, and can thus resolve them much more quickly. You don’t need to shelve some pieces of code while you wait for the rest of your code to be completed. Instead, you can send each piece of code through testing and deployment quickly and integrating those updates into more frequent releases and updates. This ensures your developers can also resolve any issues they find continuously rather than needing to look for bugs all at once at the end of the production cycle.
Continuous integration has many benefits of which these are only a few. No matter which other aspects of continuous integration benefit you, you’ll invariably benefit from the enhancements to your workflow and the higher speeds it will become capable of.
