Releasing software is a challenging process, but with continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), you can bring new features and code changes to your customers more quickly and efficiently, making it a much smoother, speedier experience.
Using this approach, automated pipelines take care of the heavy lifting, so your people can apply their skills where they're better suited, improving testing, creating resilient code, and innovating for your end users.
But if you still need clarification about the transformative power of CI/CD or some key talking points to make the case to leadership, read on for 14 big wins that doing DevOps at scale can deliver to your enterprise.
Fourteen benefits of scaling CI/CD
1. Reduced overheads
Less wasted time means lower costs for your organisation. With manual deployment off the table, your people will be freed up for more billable work. And automated testing that finds errors earlier means QA and production aren't held up.
2. More resilient code
With automation making it much easier to test code thoroughly and more frequently without worrying about your tester's attention waning, you'll catch bugs earlier and keep your code clean. With less functionality piled on top of buggy code, it's much easier to fix it. And if something does make it through, you can easily roll back to your previous state, reducing user impact.
3. Less long-term risk
Investing months working on a feature that doesn't meet your users' needs is risky and expensive. By testing how things work early and often, in a pre-production environment or with your customers, you know much more quickly whether something is worth pursuing and can pivot accordingly.
4. Time to develop tests
Writing automated tests takes some time, but it's definitely worth it in the long run. Once you've made that initial investment, the time you'll save running tests manually can be spent developing even more tests, such as performance testing and exploratory testing, to push your quality control to another level.
5. Generate more value
All that automation and regular updates mean your people can focus on collecting feedback and generating more value for your customers. Whether they're analysing user behaviour, tracking key performance indicators, or responding to market conditions, you can stay ahead of the competition.
6. Space to be experimental
You can get more out of user insights and data with a regular release cadence. Continuous deployment lets you try out different designs to reflect user behaviours and run A/B testing with almost immediate feedback. You can deploy brand-new versions to compare results over a longer period too.
7. Make money right away
With traditional pipelines, code is sitting around waiting for manual checks rather than being fast-tracked to production. Organisations implementing CI/CD can start benefiting from revenues related to new features much more quickly, knowing the code is up to scratch thanks to automated tests.
8. Speed up innovation
And money isn't the only big win of not waiting around. If you can deploy faster than the competition, you will drive innovation rather than constantly playing catch-up. That agility lets you quickly hop on trends (or set them) and resolve pain points. CI/CD enables you to listen to your customers' wants, show them what they need, experiment with new ideas, and dominate the market.
9. More efficiency, less complexity
With a common set of tools across all teams and the SDLC, you won't have to rely too much on third-party plugins or disruptive APIs. You can keep DevOps simple while scaling as much as you like. That efficiency also goes for environments too. With an infrastructure-as-code approach, environments are stored using version control to be spun up and used immediately.
10. A consistent and repeatable approach
Once you've built up your pipeline, deploying changes more and more frequently to improve your path-to-production process, you'll end up with a familiar and focused way of working that you can do consistently and scale across the organisation.
11. Trusted and transparent
Relying on automation means bad code rarely makes it to production. Not only will your customers come to trust your code more, but your staff will too. For people internally, that confidence comes from transparent testing practices and the full traceability of everyone's actions. Externally, it comes from the improved reliability of your software.
12. Break down barriers
DevOps is all about stopping siloes and bridging gaps to optimise what teams have to offer. CI/CD pipelines bring specialists together and give them greater visibility of the whole process. That way, everyone is working towards the same goals rather than in isolation. And CI/CD tools make it easier for non-developers to be in the know, fostering greater communication and collaboration across the business.
13. Attract the talent you need
While some engineers won't be familiar with CI/CD, the best talent will recognise the benefits instantly. Turnover is costly and can cause chaos, so this is not something to overlook. Being able to do more of what they love and less of what they don't in a collaborative environment will make your organisation a hotspot for the best new engineers and a place to stick with for your current employees.
14. Success you can measure
CI/CD tools provide the metrics you need to understand how your pipeline works and improve it. Whether that's speeding up build times, increasing test coverage, or reducing your defect rate, you'll have the figures at your fingertips to see where blockers lie and find a way to fix them. Not to mention access to the stats to see where you're succeeding too.
Want more of the good stuff?
CI/CD sounds good, doesn't it? We sure think so. That's why we help businesses like yours to implement CI/CD tools, processes, and cultural practices that see DevOps initiatives soar.
If helping your teams to build, test, and deploy software more efficiently is something you can't afford to miss, get in touch.
