5 Essential Tips for Your CI/CD Pipeline 2019

A continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline is a software development protocol that expedites the process of delivering new features. CI/CD is a development strategy that supports automation. These pipelines automatically test software developer's coding any time there are changes made. In turn, software developers are able to take advantage of the automated quality control to assure that the product updates are timely.

Structuring a CI/CD pipeline equipped for 2019 can be challenging. Here we will demystify and give you the information you need to build an active pipeline that will enhance the efficiency of your development operations (DevOps) team. The following five essential tips will aid your CI/CD pipeline building efforts.

1. Team Management is Key

If there is a significant system failure or another issue, you need to contact individual team members urgently. If a CI/CD pipeline is not running effectively, it may result in a delay in the process of contacting members. Address this by prioritizing team management as you find ways to improve your pipeline. By developing a good CI/CD pipeline, you are able to simplify the process of issuing DevOps team alerts, create service tickets, etc.

The incorporation of an incident management application will strengthen your CI/CD pipeline. The development team benefits from being able to keep consistent contact with other members of the group amid incidents. Also, this software also grants access to on-call schedules and alerts via the internet and mobile apps.

2. Improve Communications

Fast and reliable communicational protocols need to be implemented with the creation of a modern CI/CD pipeline. If team members are unable to maintain reliable communication, a host of issues can arise for employees and customers.

In this modern era, there are plenty of tools available to help development teams communicate amongst each other. For example, DevOps teams can use incident software to send alerts to team members on demand. You can also use cloud computing software for collaboration efforts. This software will allow team members to communicate with each other and maintain the project schedule.

3. Merge Your Resources

Development teams tend to use a plethora of systems to perform their daily deeds. Finding ways to use these platforms in concert can be challenging.

In 2019, a CI/CD pipeline will link the systems and establish message flows between them. Worthwhile incident management software comes complete with a combination of outbound and pre-built integrations.

4. Tailor Your Setup

Obviously, a development team at a small company will not have the resources or budget of a company at a more massive corporation. Similarly, these two companies will have different CI/CD pipelines. A CI/CD pipeline of today should be tailor-made to address the specific needs of the development team.

A development team can also opt to build a CI/CD pipeline to handle its day-to-day tasks. This means that automation of the often mundane duties can be outsourced to the CI/CD pipeline. Alert escalations and incident management software can be used to customize the continuous integration and continuous delivery pipeline.

5. Conduct Routine Testing

Metrics produced by CI/CD pipelines must be analyzed by DevOps teams. If this analysis is not done, it results in missing out on opportunities to increase productivity. It is always wise to look deeper than the underlying metrics. Patterns and trends can be spotted by team members that analyze the data gathered. The information gathered, and the results of the analysis can help the development team understand issues and ascertain possible solutions.

Routine and random testing can boost productivity also. This type of testing gives the development team a chance to identify and fix issues before they worsen. This risk-reducing effort saves the company from the expenses related to outages and downtime.

Again, software that offers incident alerts and management along with logging analytics capabilities that help teams optimize the use of the data gathered. Typical incident resolutions, violations to the service-level agreement (SLA) and critical metrics are able to be collected at increments from weekly and monthly to annually. This lets teams assess contractors, and make staffing budget and staffing adjustments when necessary.

Conclusion

In the year 2019, a CI/CD pipeline is an essential element for development teams. This pipeline helps groups maintain their scheduling obligations and benefit from build automation. This software gives the ability for team members to manage communication and address outages and downtime issues. Adhering to the tips provided above will assist your team with the smooth integration of CI/CD pipelines to your DevOps team.