CI/CD Best Practices for Faster, Reliable, and Scalable Software Delivery

"Delivering quality software applications fast," is no longer a competitive advantage; it's an expectation in software development. 

While the industry, as a whole, is very fluid based on the success and failures; the fact is, it has shifted from a competitive advantage, to now an expectation that you will deliver a quality code base, within a timeframe. 

In this time of Continuous Integration/ Continuous Deployment (CI/CD), most of the time, agile development teams are used to building, testing, and deploying applications, in real time; with a robust CI/CD system in place, teams can implement quick updates, fix bugs, and deploy user-based updates, as quickly as they can develop the software. 

Just because you have implemented a CI/CD process does not mean you are now done, and that you will be successful. The benefit of implementing a CI/CD process is you will be able to customize it to your team's or organization's tools, workflows, and CI/CD best practices.

This article will highlight some of CI/CD best practices, and present actionable items that you can implement, and practical world-based experience tips that will help your organization leverage CI/CD tools and practices. 

Laying the Foundation for a Successful CI/CD Approach

It is essential to develop a foundation first for your CI/CD practice before diving into the advanced topics. When we see teams skip, overlook, or avoid those, we often see horrible bottlenecks, unreliable deployments, and misappropriation of the tools/resources that aid us in the process.

• Understand Your CI/CD Goals

Every organization has different desired expedience. For some organizations, it may be speed. For others, it may be deploying to production without issues or reliability. Define success with your CI/CD implementation and choose tools and processes to support that understanding.

• Choose the Right Tools for Your Workflow

The CI/CD ecosystem is vast. Tools like Jenkins, GitLab CI, CircleCI, and GitHub Actions are all great options. Select the tools that make sense for the size of your team, your tech stack, and the scaling goals you have for the future.

• Establish a Clear Branching Strategy

An established branching pattern can keep your code organized and lower the number of merge conflicts when you are pushing your changes. Popular branching patterns include GitFlow, trunk-based development, feature branching, and others. Choose the pattern that aligns best with your established CI/CD pipeline best practices.

CI/CD Best Practices for Long-Term Success

Once you have established the groundwork for your pipeline, it is time to improve and automate it. The following practices can help drastically improve your speed of delivery, quality of delivery, and trust in your delivery.

• Automate as Much as Possible

Automation is the foundation of CI/CD automation strategies. By automating all manual steps in your CD process (i.e., running tests, deploying to staging environments, etc), you eliminate human error and increase speed-to-release. In relation to software release automation, it also eliminates having to release as a group with teams, so they can deploy updates on a typical basis (frequently).

• Maintain Small and Frequent Commits

It is more challenging for an organization to review, test, co-deploy, and deploy code changes when making larger code changes. First, motivate your developers to commit smaller chunks of code, more frequently. This will reduce future merge conflicts and make debugging easier when something breaks.

• Prioritize Testing in the Pipeline

All of your code concepts in your pipeline should have automated testing as part of the above concepts: unit testing, integration testing, and end-to-end testing to detect errors earlier. For CI/CD workflow optimization, run parallel tests to more effectively reduce run time.

• Implement Continuous Monitoring

CI/CD does not stop just because the code is deployed. You can implement monitoring tooling to gauge application performance, track bugs in production, and monitor anomaly detection before minor issues become major. Early monitoring leads to speedier recourse.

• Keep Your Pipeline Configurations in Code

You can version-control your CI/CD pipeline configuration files to consistently enforce your environments. This way, new projects or teams can quickly replicate and develop their environment.

• Make Security an Integral Part of CI/CD

Security has now become a necessity and not a matter of choice. As part of optimizing your CI/CD workflow, this should include automated security checks, vulnerability scanning, and compliance validation. This will help prevent breaches to your pipeline from happening in the first place.

• Optimize for Speed Without Sacrificing Quality

Speed is a key factor when deploying functionality to production - but not at the expense of quality. Applying a CI/CD implementation strategy that allows your software development company to continue moving at speed, but also encourages a focus on quality, can ensure the scales are balanced between speed and quality maintenance.

• Use Rollback Mechanisms for Safer Deployments

Even with the best-laid plans, things can and will go wrong. Having a fast rollback plan to minimise downtime and customer impact just makes sense.

• Foster Collaboration Between Dev and Ops

CI/CD is just as much about culture as it is about tools. You will want to emphasize communication between developers, testers, and operations, and encourage each group to transition responsibility from each piece of the process they have control over.

• Review and Improve Regularly

Technology is changing swiftly. Scheduling quarterly reviews of your CI/CD pipeline best practices makes it easier for you to identify bottlenecks sooner and adopt better tools and workflows. 

How to Build a Strong CI/CD Culture?

No matter how well designed the pipeline turns out to be, without the proper team culture it will likely fail. Success with CI/CD depends largely on shared ownership, transparency, and the ability to pivot when needed.

• Promote Knowledge Sharing

Conduct regular, scheduled sessions to provide suggestions for lessons learned, new features of tools, or workflow improvements. This keeps the entire team aligned with the change.

• Encourage Experimentation

CI/CD can have the most success in cultures where teams experiment with new automation tools and processes without needing to fear failure in doing so. 

• Reward Continuous Improvement

Celebrate teams and individuals that suggest improvements that do result in faster delivery or fewer bugs. This creates a culture of continuous progress.

The Role of a Custom Software Development Company in CI/CD Success

For companies that don't have a large skill level of DevOps internally, a custom software development company can help expedite adoption as they will have known processes, access to specialized talent, and experience implementing CI/CD best practices effectively at scale. 

They can help you design a proper CI/CD implementation strategy, establish automated testing frameworks, and even align the pipeline to business objectives. They can also help you avoid pitfalls and expedite your return on investment.

Conclusion: Making CI/CD Work for You

CI/CD is not simply a tool chain, it is an attitude that values velocity, quality, and responsiveness. By following best practice CI/CD practices, adopting automation and focusing on continual improvement we can expect our releases to be faster, but also more reliable.

Whether you build your own pipeline or work with a custom software development company, the crucial part here is continuously improving and looking for opportunities to adapt to the technology.

As the years ahead will only see improvement in competition within the software industry, businesses that invest in CI/CD workflow optimization will be ahead in delivering innovative solutions for tomorrow. The decision is easy: improve your process, adopt automation technology, and set your development lifecycle up for success for years to come.