What is Continuous Integration?

Continuous Integration, also known or called as CI in short. It is a part of the software development process generally used in DevOps practices where users/teams can collaborate and seamlessly work together to integrate new code changes or add new features into the existing codebase using a version control system.

• With Continuous Integration (CI) you or your team members can automate project workflows and simplify the process of building, testing, and deployment of software to different stages in the environment. Here environments are nothing but Staging, Dev, Test, QA and Prod.
• Continuous Integration (CI) will improve communication, track changes, fix bugs, and reduce conflicts in the code.

What Continuous Integration (CI) does?

Continuous Integration (CI) follows the fundamental practices of planning, coding, making changes or merging, checking results, and pushing. To adapt CI to your project, the first thing you do is find the perfect services and DevOps tools. Here are some of best continuous integration tools currently used by many organization:

• Jenkins
• CircleCI
• GitHub Actions
• Azure Pipelines
• GitLab CI/CD
• Bitbucket Pipelines

With these CI tools, you can manage source code, versioning, build, test and release.

Here is the quick Overview of Continuous Integration Workflow:

User(s)/Team(s) >> Plan >> Code >> Merge changes to Source Branch >> Build Artifact >> Test the Functionality >> Submit Checks and Report. (repeat the process)

Why is Continuous Integration Needed?

Adopting Continuous Integration with help to improve code and software quality in a phase wise manner. By automating the CI software developers can spend more time on tasks related to new code additions and fixing bugs rather than focusing on infrastructure deployment.

By adopting CI developers or teams can identify and fix bugs before they are merged into the main codebase and released to production. This will also reduce the time it takes to release new updates by automating the build and test process.

With implementation of CI you or your team member can have the complete visibility and transparency of the development process. Anyone who has access on the CI can identify and track the process of build and test. With that information team users can identify bottlenecks and can find areas for improvement.

How does Continuous Integration Work?

Assume that you have CI Repo (Branch as Release). Whenever you or your teammates commit any changes to the code repository and the CI service automatically fetches the commit changes done by you or your teams and builds the artifacts and deploys to the environment.

Continuous Integration Benefits

Continuous Integration (CI) simplifies the process of automating the tasks. These are some benefits that you should be aware of.

• Reduce Manual Tasks: CI helps in reducing the manual tasks involved in the software development process. By reducing the manual activities in the projects save lot of time and efforts.
• Code Integrations and Improvements: Help to improve code quality by automating the testing of code changes and by providing developers with feedback on their changes.
• Collaboration with Team members: If you are in a team working together with your team members then this CI will help your developers team to share and integrate their work. This will improve communication and reduce conflicts in the code.
• Visibility and Transparency: CI provides developers with visibility of code change. This helps developers to quickly identify the changes and to fix problems asap.
• Faster Release: When you set up continuous integration with continuous deployment, your changes will be live whenever you make changes to your code and push it to the release branch.

Continuous Integration vs Continuous Deployment vs Continuous Delivery

Continuous Integration(CI), Continuous Deployment (CD) or Continuous Delivery(CD) are all part of the software development process.

Continuous Integration(CI)	Continuous Delivery (CD)	Continuous Deployment (CD)
Continuous Integration(CI) is a process to integrate code changes in a repository frequently and automatically built, tested, and merged into the main branch.	Continuous Delivery (CD) is a process to build on Continuous Integration(CI) by automating the deployment process delivering the content or features live to different environments.	Continuous Deployment (CD) is a process to deploy the software based on tests performed from Continuous Delivery (CD) and moving the changes to live environment or production environment.
Automation for: Building and Testing	Automation for: deployment of code changes.	Automation for: deployment of code changes to production based on tests passed.
Release Type: Manual(User Chnages)	Release Type: It can Manual or Automated	Release Type: Fully Automated.

FAQs on Continuous Integration:

Q1: What is Continuous Integration (CI) in short?

Answer:

CI is a software development practice that simplifies the process of integration and automating the build, test, and deployment process.

Q2: What are the key components of Continuous Integration (CI)?

Answer:

Version control system, Build and Test automation are the key components of CI.

Q3: What are popular Continuous Integration (CI) tools in 2023?

Answer:

Jenkins, CircleCI, GitLab CI/CD, GitHub Actions, Azure Pipelines, Bitbucket Pipelines, Bamboo… There are many but these are the popular CI tools in 2023.

Q4: What are the main benefits of Continuous Integration (CI)?

Answer:

Adopting CI can help in the improvements of code quality, development and productivity, reduced time to release, visibility and transparency and complete automation of build and test.