CI/CD Best Practices

The benefits of CI/CD are well known, but how can you get the most out of these DevOps processes?

Continuous integration, delivery, and deployment streamline the process of building, testing, and releasing code. These processes can help you get a working product into your users’ hands more quickly than traditional methods. A well-executed automated build pipeline will help you and your team consistently deliver working software quickly and get prompt feedback on your latest changes.

Let’s explore the continuous integration and delivery best practices you should consider applying to your pipeline.

In this article:

Commit early, commit often

Ensuring all your source code, configuration files, scripts, and dependencies are stored in version control is an essential first step in implementing continuous integration.

However, a version control system alone is not enough – how you use it counts. The aim of continuous integration is to make implementing changes from multiple contributors easier. The key to this approach is committing and sharing your code changes more frequently.

Here’s how it works:

  • Each commit triggers a set of automated tests, providing rapid feedback on your changes to address any bugs quickly. The more often you commit, the more regularly you receive this feedback.
  • Frequent sharing of changes with your team ensures everyone builds on the same foundation, helping you collaborate and reducing the risk of merge conflicts when integrating large, complex changes.
  • Your branching strategy determines where you push your changes to – your main branch, a dedicated feature branch, or a designated development branch.
  • As a guideline, aim for everyone on your team to commit and share their changes at least once daily.

Overcome initial hurdles

Committing frequently may feel uncomfortable at first, often due to fear of scrutiny or handling tasks that exceed a day’s capacity. Creating a culture of collaboration rather than judgement within the team is essential. When implementing changes to work practices, discussing how you work as a team is helpful. Breaking tasks into smaller, more manageable chunks can help individuals adopt this practice.

Keep the builds green

You will get the most out of your CI/CD practice if you maintain a constantly releasable codebase. This approach enhances efficiency by addressing bugs as soon as they arise and enables you to roll out a fix quickly if something goes wrong in production.

While automated tests and pipeline stages provide immediate feedback on whether your code is releasable, this best practice focuses on how you respond to any issues they highlight.

Solve problems collaboratively

The team should take collective responsibility for builds, prioritizing quick-fixes when failures occur. Rather than blaming the last developer who made changes, they should solve problems collaboratively, fostering a constructive culture that enhances the CI/CD workflow and supports continuous improvement, especially under pressure.

Prevent trivial failures

To reduce the risk of builds failing due to simple errors like syntax mistakes or missing dependencies, team members should build and run initial tests locally before sharing their changes. Everyone should use the same scripts as the CI/CD system to avoid duplicating efforts.

Build only once

A common mistake is creating a new build for each stage of your CI/CD pipeline. Rebuilding the code for different environments introduces the risk of inconsistencies and means you cannot be confident that all previous tests will have passed.

Instead, promote the same build artifact through each stage of the build pipeline and ultimately release it to live.

Maintain system-agnostic builds

Ensure your builds remain system-agnostic by calling variables, authentication parameters, configuration files, or scripts through the deployment script rather than embedding them into the build itself.

Version and store build artifacts centrally

Treat build artifacts as products of your source code. Version and store them in a central artifact repository like Nexus instead of your source control system.

Automate deployment

Use your CI server to automate the deployment of the same build artifact to each test environment. As the artifact passes through each stage, your team’s confidence in its reliability grows.

Streamline your tests

Although CI/CD relies heavily on automated testing to ensure software quality, that doesn’t mean you should test every eventuality.

Achieving a balance between test coverage and performance is crucial. If tests take too long to produce results, there’s a risk that individuals will look for reasons and ways to bypass or expedite the process.

Adopt layered test coverage

Build your automated test coverage in layers, starting with unit tests and then integration or component tests.

Prioritize quick feedback

Run the tests that are completed quickly first to get feedback as early as possible. Typically, unit tests are the quickest to run.

Consider parallel testing

Consider splitting tests into batches and running them in parallel to get results even faster.

Ease into longer tests

Only introduce longer running tests once quicker tests have passed and you’ve established confidence in the build.

Limit manual QA dependence

Given the time and team availability needed for manual quality assurance, it’s best to limit this phase until after all automated tests have successfully been completed.

Focus on higher-level tests

Don’t use longer running tests to check every eventuality. Prioritize broader coverage with lower-level tests, and concentrate higher-level tests on high-risk areas specific to your product and users.

Clean your environments

Keeping pre-production environments running for a long time can cause their settings to diverge from the original setup and from each other. This configuration drift can lead to inconsistent test results, undermining your CI/CD process.

Refreshing your testing and staging environments between each pipeline run is a best practice worth investing in.

Use containers or virtual machines

Host your test environments in containers or virtual machines for quick refreshes.

Take an infrastructure-as-code approach

Script the process of creating and tearing down environments. You can then automate these steps from your CI/CD server.

Think about scalability

Scripting environment creation makes scaling up your CI/CD process and running multiple pipelines concurrently easier.

Avoid static environments

If you choose static environments, you’ll need to maintain each one to avoid configuration drift. This can slow down the QA process and delay releases.

Secure your pipeline

A CI/CD pipeline provides access to your code and the credentials to deploy to production, making it a prime target for attackers. It’s therefore vital that you apply security best practices to your CI/CD process.

  • Version control access: Secure access to your version control repositories and require contributors to use multi-factor authentication. If you allow third parties to contribute changes, have a process for reviewing their changes before triggering a build.
  • Credentials management: Credentials and API keys are often needed to access services and environments in the CI/CD pipeline. Never store credentials in source code. Instead, use a dedicated secret store and ensure credentials are not leaked into logs or build artifacts.
  • Dependency checks: Check your third-party dependencies for known vulnerabilities as part of your continuous integration checks.
  • Secured communications: Ensure communications between your CI server and build machines are secured, and keep all machines up to date with the latest patches.
  • Principle of least privilege: Apply the principle of least privilege throughout your pipeline. This makes it harder for attackers to island hop if an account is compromised.
  • Change management: Implement change management for your pipeline configuration so that any changes are reviewed before being applied.

Stick to your process

Once you’ve invested in your CI/CD strategy and built a reliable pipeline that gives you confidence in your releases, you don’t want to undermine that effort by allowing individuals to bypass the process.

People often want to circumvent the CI/CD process for minor or urgent changes. However, it’s important not to yield for several reasons:

  • Skipping automated quality assurance stages can introduce bugs that would have otherwise been caught.
  • Issues released into production are harder to reproduce and debug without a build available for testing.
  • Diagnosing and fixing issues from “urgent” releases can take longer than going through the normal automated process.

When someone asks to bypass the process, take a moment to explain the benefits of a CI/CD pipeline. It’s also worth asking if any parts of your existing process could be improved.

Monitor and measure your pipeline

Part of the process of setting up the pipeline is implementing monitoring for the production environment (i.e. the product).

The best practice is setting up an analogous form of monitoring for the CI/CD pipeline itself.

Analyze CI/CD metrics

Use metrics collected by your CI/CD tool to identify potential issues and areas for improvement.

Monitor build frequency

Compare the number of builds triggered per week, day, or hour to understand the usage patterns of your pipeline infrastructure. Monitoring helps determine whether you need to scale and identify peak load times.

Track deployment speed

Track the speed of deployments over time to spot trends and assess when to invest in performance optimizations.

Derive insights from automated tests

Use statistics from automated tests to find areas that could benefit from parallelization.

Review QA results

Identify routinely ignored QA results to see where you could streamline your test coverage.

Make it a team effort

Creating a successful CI/CD workflow is dependent on both team and organizational culture, not just the processes and tools you employ.

Continuous integration, delivery, and deployment are core DevOps processes. They aim to break down traditional silos between developers, QA engineers, and operations, encouraging collaboration between disciplines. Embracing these DevOps best practices offers several benefits.

Enhanced visibility and collaboration

Team members get a complete view of the entire workflow and the opportunity to collaborate and benefit from different areas of expertise.

Shared responsibility

Sharing responsibility for maintaining the pipeline prevents any one person from becoming a single point of failure.

Empowerment and contribution

Encouraging shared responsibility for software delivery empowers all of your team members to contribute, whether by fixing builds, automating tasks, or improving processes.

Cultivating a culture of trust

Promoting a culture of trust, where team members can experiment and share ideas, benefits your organization and improves the software you deliver.

When things go wrong, you can use the opportunity to learn and make your CI/CD practices more robust and effective.

Why follow CI/CD best practices?

Following best practices for continuous integration, delivery, and deployment provides multiple benefits.

Accelerated delivery

Automating build, test, and deployment tasks speeds up the release process, allowing you to deliver software updates faster. Automated CI/CD is essential for reducing time to market and quickly delivering features to users.

Regular feedback

Deploying changes more often allows you to gather regular feedback from users. You can use their insights to help refine plans and adjust strategies.

Improved code quality

Automated QA processes detect bugs earlier in the development cycle, leading to faster resolutions and contributing to a cycle of more quality code and stronger software.

Increased user satisfaction

Automated checks ensure each change is consistently checked, minimizing the risk of bugs reaching production. As a result, users have a smoother experience and downtime is much less likely.

More time for creativity

Automating the repetitive steps of building, testing, and deploying your software frees up time for team members to focus on creative tasks like developing new features, making innovative designs, or enhancing your overall DevOps practices.

How to implement a CI/CD deployment strategy

Implementing continuous integration, delivery, and/or deployment can feel like a daunting task. A successful CI/CD strategy involves several key elements and requires building a strong DevOps culture over time.

Set clear goals

Like in software development projects, defining and communicating goals to your team is crucial.

Whether aiming for a weekly release cadence with continuous delivery to a pre-production environment or pursuing continuous deployment with rapid user updates, setting clear objectives is essential.

Work in manageable chunks

Once you’ve defined a goal, break down the steps involved in getting there into manageable chunks. Implementing your pipeline incrementally means you can experience the benefits of CI/CD from the outset.

Start with CI

The starting point for most teams is continuous integration. CI involves tasks like version control, branching strategies, adding or expanding automated test coverage, and starting to automate builds and tests. Using a CI server will help you coordinate these activities, collate results, and implement logic to automate the successive stages of building and testing.

Move towards CD

Once you have an automated CI flow in place, you can progress toward continuous delivery or deployment.

Automating environment creation saves time in the long run and makes your pipeline more reliable and robust. You can then use those environments to run more automated and manual tests.

Analyze the data

Both during implementation and once you have a CI/CD strategy in place, it’s worth analyzing the data from your CI/CD tools and engaging with team members to identify opportunities to refine your process. This iterative approach ensures ongoing improvement and maximizes the benefits of CI/CD for your team and organization.

Summary

Adopting these DevOps best practices will help you to get the most out of your continuous integration, delivery, and deployment process:

  • Commit code changes frequently. This makes it easier to integrate changes and means you get regular feedback on your work from automated builds and tests.
  • Prioritize keeping builds green. Keeping your codebase in a deployable state improves code quality and ensures you can address urgent issues in production.
  • Build only once. Promoting the same build artifact through successive environments means you can be confident that the code has passed each stage of testing.
  • Streamline automated tests. Even automated tests take time to execute. Run the ones that provide the quickest feedback first.
  • Refresh environments after each pipeline run. This avoids configuration drift and ensures you can rely on the results of each CI/CD stage.
  • Secure your pipeline. With access to your source code and production environment, CI/CD pipelines can be lucrative targets for hackers, so implementing CI/CD security is vital.
  • Stick to your process. Bypassing your CI/CD pipeline may seem tempting when a change is trivial or urgent, but it often costs more in the long run.
  • Monitor and measure your pipeline. Analyzing the data from your pipeline can help you make it more robust and efficient.
  • Make the process a team effort. Maintaining the pipeline should never be the job of a single person. Adopting a DevOps mindset offers a range of benefits.

How TeamCity can help

TeamCity is a CI/CD automation platform designed to help you build and scale your CI/CD pipelines. Whatever your existing build and test automation level, getting started with TeamCity is straightforward.

Extensive integrations for all leading version control systems, support for popular build and test frameworks, and an intuitive web-based UI mean you can create your first pipeline in minutes. Full support for configuration-as-code allows you to generate all your pipeline definitions from the UI and store them in version control.

TeamCity’s highly scalable and performant design ensures rapid feedback from automated tests, while integrations with major IDEs and messaging platforms provide notifications wherever you’re working. Extensive security features help keep your source code and your pipelines safe from attackers.

As your process matures, you can take advantage of TeamCity’s built-in test coverage reports, flaky test identification, and build agent stats to keep optimizing your CI/CD processes.