What is CI/CD?

CI stands for continuous integration and CD is often used interchangeably between continuous delivery and continuous deployment. The scope of what teams end up achieving within each of these varies a lot. Some teams begin with automated testing procedures after code is merged into the main branch, and others might go as far as testing every single commit in the feature branches, while the developers push code daily. Some might deploy to test environments and wait for the QA team to give the green light, and others might deploy every single commit to production – of course, with a lot of automation baked in. Before going any further, let’s detail these three concepts further.

CI is a practice that enables software teams to merge the code from all developers with the least amount of friction. This goal is achieved by running automated tests on frequently created builds. Instead of waiting for a merge day, or the final release, this approach promotes the...