10 CI/CD Commandments

Continuous Integration is a software development practice in which team members integrate their work frequently. Usually each person integrates at least daily - leading to many code integrations per day. Each integration is verified by an automated build and test to detect errors as quickly as possible.

CI has become a de-facto part of creating software. With it we can build trust in the software development process and safeguard the business from software development projects being delayed or delivered buggy and incomplete.

Doing CI/CD very well can be difficult. Here are 10 commandments to help get there:

1. Have a single main core repository for a single project.
2. Use gates to stop broken code, run tests on every check-in, and if checks fail reject the code check-in.
3. Automate all the things in the CI pipeline. The pipeline should not rely on humans.
4. Every commit of code should trigger a new build of the entire project.
5. Fix every broken build immediately.
6. Keep the build process fast and avoid bottlenecks.
7. Make the entire process transparent and make sure team members understand the CI process.
8. Deploy every check-in into a clone of the production environment (staging).
9. Make the whole process accessible and make it quick for new team members to get started.
10. Code deployments need to be automated.

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