Effective CI/CD and Continuous Verification
Holistic Delivery Pipeline Disciplines
Many organization strive for a structured, fast and continuous value delivery to customers by maintaining high quality and reliability standards.
Continuous Integration
Objective: CI ensures that code changes are frequently integrated into a shared repository.
Maturity Assessment: Evaluate how well teams adhere to CI practices:
Automated Builds: Are builds triggered automatically on code commits?
Unit Testing: Is there comprehensive unit test coverage?
Code Quality Checks: Are code style and linting checks part of the process?
Continuous Delivery (CD)
Objective: CD ensures that code changes are ready for production deployment.
Maturity Assessment: Assess the CD pipeline:
Deployment Automation: Is deployment automated?
Environment Promotion: Can code move seamlessly across environments?
Rollback Strategies: Are rollback mechanisms in place?
Continuous Verification
Objective: CV validates system behavior throughout the delivery pipeline.
Maturity Assessment:
Evaluate verification practices:
Automated Testing: Is testing comprehensive (unit, integration, end-to-end)?
Monitoring and Observability: Are metrics and logs used for validation?
Security Scans: Are security checks part of the pipeline?
Maturity Assesment
Effective Continuous Delivery (CD) is essential for modern development environments, yet many organizations struggle with inefficiencies. Common signs of non-effective CD include developers being unable to focus on business value due to pipeline-related tasks.
ML/AI-assisted CI/CD pipelines can automate these burdensome tasks. Building and maintaining a unified or custom holistic pipeline requires dedicated attention, and delivery value often relies on highly coupled dependencies and manual interventions.
To facilitate effective CD, feedback on software delivery speed and quality is crucial. Operationalizing Agile practices, ensuring compliance, managing value streams, and delivering cloud-native applications are fundamental.
Additionally, a strong platform engineering approach, mobile app delivery capabilities, and support for edge computing scenarios are vital to achieve seamless and secure deployments.
Maturity Levels
Benchmarks
CI Benchmark Levels
Basic: Manual builds, sporadic testing.
Intermediate: Automated builds, unit tests, and basic code quality checks.
Advanced: Extensive test suites, parallel builds, and integration with other tools.
CD Benchmark Levels
Initial: Manual deployments, limited environment consistency.
Managed: Automated deployments, environment parity.
Optimized: Blue-green deployments, feature flags, and canary releases.
Remember that benchmarks are not static; they evolve as industry practices improve. Organizations should aim to progress from lower to higher maturity levels based on their specific context and goals.
CV Benchmark Levels
Foundational: Basic testing, minimal observability.
Intermediate: Comprehensive testing, observability, and security scans.
Advanced: Chaos engineering, synthetic monitoring, and compliance checks.