5 Best Benefits of Implementing CI/CD in Your Organization

Introduction

CI/CD, comprises of two related practices — continuous integration and continuous delivery, is an integral part of modern development that intended to reduce errors during integration and deployment while increasing project velocity. CI/CD has a myriad of benefits, in this article, we will walk you through the 5 best benefits of implementing CI/CD in your organization.

5 Benefits of Implementing CI/CD in Your Organization

1. Reduce Costs

Automation in the CI/CD pipeline reduces the number of errors that can take place in the many repetitive steps of CI and CD. Doing so also frees up developer time that could be spent on product development as there aren’t as many code changes to fix down the road if the error is caught quickly. Another thing to keep in mind: increasing code quality with automation also increases your ROI.

Some popular CI/CD tools that are currently available on the market are: Github and Bitbucket, Jenkins for build automation, and Selenium and Katalon Studio for test automation.

2. Customer Satisfaction

The advantages of CI/CD do not only fall into the technical aspect but also in an organization scope. The first few moments of a new customer trying out your product is a make-or-break-it moment.

Don’t waste first impressions as they are key to turning new customers into satisfied customers. Keep your customers happy with fast turnaround of new features and bug fixes. Utilizing a CI/CD approach also keeps your product up-to-date with the latest technology and allows you to gain new customers who will select you over the competition through word-of-mouth and positive reviews.

Your customers are the main users of your product. As such, what they have to say should be taken into high consideration. Whether the comments are positive or negative, customer feedback and involvement leads to usability improvements and overall customer satisfaction.

Your customers want to know they are being heard. Adding new features and changes into your CI/CD pipeline based on the way your customers use the product will help you retain current users and gain new ones.

3. Faster Release Rate

Failures are detected faster and as such, can be repaired faster, leading to increasing release rates. However, frequent releases are possible only if the code is developed in a continuously moving system.

CI/CD continuously merges codes and continuously deploys them to production after thorough testing, keeping the code in a release-ready state. It’s important to have as part of deployment a production environment set up that closely mimics that which end-users will ultimately be using. Containerization is a great method to test the code in a production environment to test only the area that will be affected by the release.

4. Increase Team Transparency and Accountability

CI/CD is a great way to get continuous feedback not only from your customers but also from your own team. This increases the transparency of any problems in the team and encourages responsible accountability.

CI is mostly focused on the development team, so the feedback from this part of the pipeline affects build failures, merging problems, architectural setbacks, etc. CD focuses more on getting the product quickly to the end-users to get the much-needed customer feedback. Both CI and CD provide rapid feedback, allowing you to steadily and continuously make your product even better.

5. Smaller backlog

Incorporating CI/CD into your organization’s development process reduces the number of non-critical defects in your backlog. These small defects are detected prior to production and fixed before being released to end-users.

The benefits of solving non-critical issues ahead-of-time are many. For example, your developers have more time to focus on larger problems or improving the system and your testers can focus less on small problems so they can find larger problems before being released. Another benefit (and perhaps the best one) is keeping your customers happy by preventing them from finding many errors in your product.

Want to dive deeper into the benefits of CI/CD? Check out this article

Conclusion

Nowadays, companies are striving for faster release cycles and higher quality software. While CI/CD is beneficial in many ways, it’s no one-size-fits-all solution for every organization. I hope this article will help you decide if this is the right step for your organization to take.