With an increasing user demand, drastically changing market dynamics, and technological innovation happening at a blink of an eye, software applications have become extremely complex.

Although the development teams are striving hard to achieve the deadlines of a project, their disjoint nature is one of the main reasons for delayed time-to-market, high cost of development, and poor product quality. It becomes difficult to incorporate code changes due to poor integration between teams. It often results in multiple product versions being released into the market. 

This creates a need for Continuous Integration. Continuous Integration or CI allows multiple development teams to work in tandem and incorporate new and advanced features without any hassles to meet the evolving needs of the market. It integrates the efforts of developers frequently which results in faster feedback loops, early discovery of bugs, and improved quality of products. 

What Challenges Does CI Solve?

Application development is no longer a task of the handful of developers. As applications are getting more and more complex, a team of developers and other engineers need to work together to gain more value. However, the larger the size of team working, the higher the integration hell. This can result in several challenges including code conflicts, loss of work, loss of application functionality, increase in testing efforts, as well as frustrated developers and project managers.

By integrating individual work of each developer into a central repository, CI lets development teams focus on their main job of writing code. Constant collaboration between teams helps in early detection of bugs and eventually, better quality products. 

Given below are some of the challenges CI aims to solve:

Manual Builds: Manually compiling source files, packaging them, and updating database schemes cost a lot both in efforts and development time and cost. 

Developers can deploy code every 11.7 seconds on average when using CI, with Amazon steadily scaling up to handle sudden increase in traffic!

CI automates the process of running the script after a build is done. By integrating code into a shared repository several times a day, CI validates every check-in using an automated build and prevents errors or regressions.

Slow Release Process: Did you know that Apple publishes iOS security upgrades every one to two weeks and that iOS users must deal with 15 updates each year?

What do you suppose Apple is doing to maintain such a high rate of updates? Of course, CI is the route! Developers may duplicate coding efforts when they work separately on different parts of a software product and later integrate their codes with the other team members’. This produces several difficult- to-find-and-fix defects. The functional product is regularly tested and validated in a CI environment since developers merge their code modifications in a shared repository numerous times per day.

It fastens the release process by encouraging collaboration between developers and ensuring bugs are caught earlier in the cycle.

Insufficient Testing and Visibility: Applications are frequently provided with bugs, which is a primary factor in consumers becoming dissatisfied. This is commonly the result of unclear testing roles, insufficient testing resources, and infrequent communication.

Have you ever considered how Facebook’s user experience would differ if the latest features weren’t thoroughly tested by the testing teams?

The multi-project view enables Adobe to understand how a change to any one product impacts the other products in the ecosystem. Adobe uses CI to interact with a variety of technologies.

By establishing the framework for automated test suites, CI addresses the issue of insufficient testing. CI gathers test results and shares them with the entire project team by keeping an eye on the central code repository and conducting tests on each change that is made. The state of a project’s source code is continuously transmitted to all involved engineers thanks to this automation. Teams gain the confidence to make changes; defects are simpler to find and fix, and a functional application is always available.

Unhappy Clients: Any software product that is created with longer gaps between integration will undoubtedly make it increasingly harder to identify and fix issues. This can result in unhappy clients as it can easily knock a project off-schedule or cause it to fail altogether.

It is not easy for Netflix to serve 139 million users. However, it can continuously stress test its infrastructure and proactively find and fix vulnerabilities before they have an impact on customers by using a set of CI tools.

Since CI enables frequent integration, there is a lot less backtracking to figure out what went wrong. Developers can spend more time designing features and less time waiting to see if the code will work by spotting problems early and nipping them in the bud.  

What is the Impact?

Integration can become very complicated and have a significant impact on the team’s productivity when several changes are made to functional software.

Any business could suffer from integration hell, which can take an eternity to test and fix errors. Releases may be postponed. Additionally, teams may experience stress as a result of lengthy and unpredictable release cycles.

However, developers may secure a quicker and more thoroughly integrated deployment with CI, which will have a good effect on the software development process. When properly applied, CI can lead to:

Regular working releases: Regular working releases are the outcome of CI, which enables even the tiniest modifications to the source code to be made and routinely integrated with the rest of the code base. Development teams can put new features into use more quickly and deliver the product to customers frequently.

Reduced risk: Continuous integration (CI) lowers the likelihood that defects will enter production by regularly deploying new updates or features. For development teams, CI makes every release less dramatic and painful while enabling them to address issues more quickly.

Lower development costs: Because CI automates testing, it saves money by eliminating the need to create test suites and manually test updates to the product. Parallel testing and automated builds make sure that developers spend less time (and consequently less money) addressing errors.

Better products: CI makes sure defects are found the moment they are introduced by running tests and inspections multiple times per day. Automated tests increase test coverage, guaranteeing the program is free of bugs and functions in a larger variety of environments. By regularly releasing updates to your software, you may produce better goods with happier customers.

Higher value: CI reduces repetitive processes in code compilation, database integration, testing, inspection, deployment, and feedback by fostering constant collaboration across diverse teams. It makes sure the procedure is followed exactly each time, allowing developers to concentrate on more challenging jobs and provide tangible results more quickly.

Get the Business Advantage

Traditional application development methodologies are no longer able to keep up with customers’ changing expectations in the modern world. Changes are done in isolation and problems are solved in isolation when each developer works independently or as a team, without being aware of the larger context.

When several teams attempt to integrate the code, problems become more complex and expensive to resolve, projects are delayed, and it becomes very challenging, if not impossible, to provide actual value. With the help of CI, development teams can quickly adapt their product to changing market conditions and customer demands.

It lowers the cost of construction and identifies defects early in the cycle by making integration a routine, straightforward job that can be repeated. When properly implemented, CI will assist in meeting quickly shifting demand and will transform the release process into a competitive advantage.