Deployment pipeline

We spoke about the importance of CI in Chapter 2, Basics of Continuous Integration, and while CI is an important productivity enhancer, it is mainly useful for development teams. It is common to see bottlenecks in software life cycles with QA and operations teams when waiting for fixes or updated documentation. QA can be left waiting for a good build by the development team. Development teams may also receive bug reports many weeks after they have completed a new feature. All of these situations lead to non-deployable software, which ultimately leads to software that you cannot deliver to your end users. Creating push button deployment builds that can be deployed to testing, staging, and production environments can help alleviate such issues, as we noted previously.