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In software engineering, CI/CD or CICD is the combined practices of continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) or, less often, continuous deployment. [1] They are sometimes referred to collectively as continuous development or continuous software development. [2]
CI/CD bridges the gaps between development and operation activities and teams by enforcing automation in building, testing and deployment of applications. CI/CD services compile the incremental code changes made by developers, then link and package them into software deliverables. [3] Automated tests verify the software functionality, and automated deployment services deliver them to end users. [4] The aim is to increase early defect discovery, increase productivity, and provide faster release cycles. The process contrasts with traditional methods where a collection of software updates were integrated into one large batch before deploying the newer version.
Modern-day DevOps practices involve:
of software applications throughout its development life cycle. The CI/CD practice, or CI/CD pipeline , forms the backbone of modern day DevOps operations.
In software testing, test automation is the use of software separate from the software being tested to control the execution of tests and the comparison of actual outcomes with predicted outcomes. Test automation can automate some repetitive but necessary tasks in a formalized testing process already in place, or perform additional testing that would be difficult to do manually. Test automation is critical for continuous delivery and continuous testing.
Continuous integration (CI) is the practice of integrating source code changes frequently and ensuring that the integrated codebase is in a workable state.
Release engineering, frequently abbreviated as RE or as the clipped compound Releng, is a sub-discipline in software engineering concerned with the compilation, assembly, and delivery of source code into finished products or other software components. Associated with the software release life cycle, it was said by Boris Debic of Google Inc. that release engineering is to software engineering as manufacturing is to an industrial process:
Release engineering is the difference between manufacturing software in small teams or startups and manufacturing software in an industrial way that is repeatable, gives predictable results, and scales well. These industrial style practices not only contribute to the growth of a company but also are key factors in enabling growth.
Build automation is the practice of building software systems in a relatively unattended fashion. The build is configured to run with minimized or no software developer interaction and without using a developer's personal computer. Build automation encompasses the act of configuring the build system as well the resulting system itself.
AnthillPro is a software tool originally developed and released as one of the first continuous integration servers. AnthillPro automates the process of building code into software projects and testing it to verify that project quality has been maintained. Software developers are able to identify bugs and errors earlier by using AnthillPro to track, collate, and test changes in real time to a collectively maintained body of computer code.
In software engineering, the laws of software evolution refer to a series of laws that Lehman and Belady formulated starting in 1974 with respect to software evolution. The laws describe a balance between forces driving new developments on one hand, and forces that slow down progress on the other hand. Over the past decades the laws have been revised and extended several times.
Code integrity is a measurement used in the software delivery lifecycle. It measures how high the source code's quality is when it is passed on to QA, and is affected by how thoroughly the code was processed by correctness-checking processes. Examples for such correctness-checking processes can be unit testing and integration testing, code review, test automation, AI-based code analysis etc. Code integrity is the combination of applying code correctness processes along with metrics that measure the completeness of these correctness-checking processes, such as, for example, code coverage. While code integrity is usually achieved by unit testing the source code to reach high code coverage, it is definitely not the only way, or the best way, to achieve code integrity. In fact, code coverage, a popular metric to measure the thoroughness of unit tests, is known to have a limited correlation with the measure of real code integrity.
In software engineering, a software development process or software development life cycle (SDLC) is a process of planning and managing software development. It typically involves dividing software development work into smaller, parallel, or sequential steps or sub-processes to improve design and/or product management. The methodology may include the pre-definition of specific deliverables and artifacts that are created and completed by a project team to develop or maintain an application.
Release management is the process of managing, planning, scheduling and controlling a software build through different stages and environments; it includes testing and deploying software releases.
DevOps is a methodology in the software development and IT industry. Used as a set of practices and tools, DevOps integrates and automates the work of software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) as a means for improving and shortening the systems development life cycle. DevOps is complementary to agile software development; several DevOps aspects came from the agile way of working.
Continuous testing is the process of executing automated tests as part of the software delivery pipeline to obtain immediate feedback on the business risks associated with a software release candidate. Continuous testing was originally proposed as a way of reducing waiting time for feedback to developers by introducing development environment-triggered tests as well as more traditional developer/tester-triggered tests.
Continuous delivery (CD) is a software engineering approach in which teams produce software in short cycles, ensuring that the software can be reliably released at any time. It aims at building, testing, and releasing software with greater speed and frequency. The approach helps reduce the cost, time, and risk of delivering changes by allowing for more incremental updates to applications in production. A straightforward and repeatable deployment process is important for continuous delivery.
Continuous deployment (CD) is a software engineering approach in which software functionalities are delivered frequently and through automated deployments.
In software engineering, a microservice architecture is an architectural pattern that arranges an application as a collection of loosely coupled, fine-grained services, communicating through lightweight protocols. A microservice-based architecture enables teams to develop and deploy their services independently, reduce code interdependency and increase readability and modularity within a codebase. This is achieved by reducing several dependencies in the codebase, allowing developers to evolve their services with limited restrictions, and reducing additional complexity. Consequently, organizations can develop software with rapid growth and scalability, as well as implement off-the-shelf services more easily. These benefits come with the cost of needing to maintain a decoupled structure within the codebase, which means its initial implementation is more complex than that of a monolithic codebase. Interfaces need to be designed carefully and treated as APIs.
A DevOps toolchain is a set or combination of tools that aid in the delivery, development, and management of software applications throughout the systems development life cycle, as coordinated by an organisation that uses DevOps practices.
CircleCI is a continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) platform that can be used to implement DevOps practices. The company was founded in September 2011 and has raised $315 million in venture capital funding as of 2021, at a valuation of $1.7 billion. CircleCI is one of the world's most popular CI/CD platforms. Facebook, Coinbase, Sony, Kickstarter, GoPro, and Spotify used CircleCI in 2019.
MLOps or ML Ops is a paradigm that aims to deploy and maintain machine learning models in production reliably and efficiently. The word is a compound of "machine learning" and the continuous delivery practice (CI/CD) of DevOps in the software field. Machine learning models are tested and developed in isolated experimental systems. When an algorithm is ready to be launched, MLOps is practiced between Data Scientists, DevOps, and Machine Learning engineers to transition the algorithm to production systems. Similar to DevOps or DataOps approaches, MLOps seeks to increase automation and improve the quality of production models, while also focusing on business and regulatory requirements. While MLOps started as a set of best practices, it is slowly evolving into an independent approach to ML lifecycle management. MLOps applies to the entire lifecycle - from integrating with model generation, orchestration, and deployment, to health, diagnostics, governance, and business metrics.
Static application security testing (SAST) is used to secure software by reviewing the source code of the software to identify sources of vulnerabilities. Although the process of statically analyzing the source code has existed as long as computers have existed, the technique spread to security in the late 90s and the first public discussion of SQL injection in 1998 when Web applications integrated new technologies like JavaScript and Flash.
TestOps refers to the discipline of managing the operational aspects of testing within the software delivery lifecycle.
Mobile DevOps is a set of practices that applies the principles of DevOps specifically to the development of mobile applications. Traditional DevOps focuses on streamlining the software development process in general, but mobile development has its own unique challenges that require a tailored approach. Mobile DevOps is not simply as a branch of DevOps specific to mobile app development, instead an extension and reinterpretation of the DevOps philosophy due to very specific requirements of the mobile world.