The way a software is developed always affects the business. The code quality, the design, time spent in development and planning of features, all affect the promises that a company has made to its clients.
Continuous Integration helps the developers in helping the business. While going through the previous topics, you might have already figured out the benefits of implementing Continuous Integration. However, let's see some of the benefits that Continuous Integration has to offer.
When every small change in your code is built and integrated, the possibility of catching the integration errors at an early stage increases. Rather than integrating once in 6 months, as seen in the waterfall model, and then spending weeks resolving the merge issues, it is good to integrate frequently and avoid the merge hell. The Continuous Integration tool like Jenkins automatically builds and integrates your code upon check-in.
Continuous Delivery enables you to release deployable features at any point in time. From a business perspective, this is a huge advantage. The features are developed, deployed, and tested within a timeframe of 2 to 4 weeks and are ready to go live with a click of a button.
How frequent are the releases? What is the success rate of builds? What is the thing that is mostly causing a build failure? Real-time data is always a must in making critical decisions. Projects are always in the need of recent data to support decisions. Usually, managers collect this information manually, which requires time and efforts. Continuous Integration tools, such as Jenkins provide the ability to see trends and make decisions. A Continuous Integration system provides the following features:
Real-time information on the recent build status and code quality metrics.
Since integrations occur frequently with a Continuous Integration system, the ability to notice trends in build, and overall quality becomes possible.
Continuous Integration tools, such as Jenkins provide the team members with metrics about the build health. As all the build, packaging, and deployment work is automated and tracked using a Continuous Integration tool; therefore, it is possible to generate statistics about the health of all the respective tasks. These metrics can be the build failure rate, build success rate, the number of builds, who triggered the build, and so on.
All these trends can help project managers and the team to ensure that the project is heading in the right direction and at the right pace.
Also, Continuous Integration incorporates static code analysis, which again on every build gives a static report of the code quality. Some of the metrics of great interest are code style, complexity, length, and dependency.
This is the most important advantage of having a carefully implemented Continuous Integration system. Any integration issue or merge issue gets caught early. The Continuous Integration system has the facility to send notifications as soon as the build fails.
In the past, development teams performed the build, release, and deployments. Then, came the trend of having a separate team to handle build, release, and deployment work. Yet again that was not enough, as this model suffered from communication issues between the development team and the release team.
However, using Continuous Integration, all the build, release, and the deployment work gets automated. Therefore, now the development team need not worry about anything other than developing features. In most of the cases, even the completed testing is automated.
From a technical perspective, Continuous Integration helps teams work more efficiently. This is because Continuous Integration works on the agile principles. Projects that use Continuous Integration follow an automatic and continuous approach while building, testing, and integrating their code. This results in a faster development.
Since everything is automated, developers spend more time developing their code and zero time on building, packaging, integrating, and deploying it. This also helps teams, which are geographically distributed, to work together. With a good software configuration management process in place, people can work on large teams. Test Driven Development (TDD) can further enhance the agile development by increasing its efficiency.