When it comes to the latest development practices, Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) are two of the most important thing your team can do. CI’s main purpose is to make the moment of release easier, while the CD is focused on delivering small parts of the product so the team can test more and release faster.

These two techniques help your business save money, time, and is less risky than previous methods.

Read below about these two new practices, their advantages and how you can use them for your business.

Continuous integration

Developers that use this practice try to link the new features to the existing program as frequently as possible. But before doing so, the team tests what they create by testing against the product. This way, they make sure the final product is not a failure and detect the possible errors as soon as possible.

CI is a lot about testing, but don’t worry, it is all automated. Testing every step is a good strategy if you don’t want to have a bad result in the end.

Continuous delivery

CD is the next thing after CI, and it’s the next thing before showing your new features to the public. Beside automated testing, your team should also implement an automated release mechanism. By doing so, when they finish their work, all you have to do is press a button and everything goes live.

Continuous delivery gives your team the chance to schedule when they want to release something. It can be daily or weekly, but the best decision you can make together is to release as often as possible.

The benefits of continuous integration

Here are the main benefits of CI and what it will require.

What CI will cost you

  • The development team will invest time in writing automated tests;
  • A server where they can host and run the test every time is needed;
  • Time, as the developers integrate their changes very often (daily).

What CI will bring you

  • Once the tests are run, the chances for bugs to slip to the production stage are minimal;
  • Releasing is very easy, as all the risks are eliminated before;
  • Deep work for the project, as the team is always aware of what is happening and can easily jump to fix any issue;
  • The CI server can run a lot of tests for the smallest price;
  • The team can focus more on improvement than on testing.

The benefits of continuous delivery

Read more about what resources you need for CD and what advantages it brings.

What CD will cost you

  • You need to build a strong CI system first;
  • Your development team should automate deployments (except for the trigger);
  • The development team should adopt feature flags (this way, the customers in production won’t be affected).

What CD will bring you

A lot of time, as the team won’t need any time for release;

More feedback from customers, as you release more frequently;

No more decision making pressure, allowing space for faster iteration.

Closing thoughts

Are you ready for a new strategy for your business? Continuous integration and continuous delivery might be what you need. Save more resources by hiring a dedicated team. Here, at Team Extension, we are all about improvement and new technology. Let’s talk!