How to Support Continuous Releases in the DevOps Cycle

Agile development processes are a vehicle for faster software releases and reduced software development time. Today, organizations are adopting iterative software development for continuous and frequent integration. Organizations have also acknowledged the need for converging development activities with operations. This practice is known as DevOps. These practices focus on continuous integration and continuous delivery in modern computing infrastructures. DevOps stresses on the importance of communication, collaboration, and integration. It is a new concept in agile software testing and development, which is backed by a range of software tools.

To build an effective DevOps culture, one has to explore continuous integration and continuous release processes, and leverage modern tools that support these processes.

Read Also: Tools and Techniques DevOps Continuous Integration and Testing

A Challenging Task

Continuous software release is a challenging task. It means being able to build, test and deploy entire products with the latest changes in the codebase. It requires multiple environments for continuous development and low-level testing, and needs quality assurance (QA), staging and production continually.

The first step in an automated CI workflow requires commitment of the code to a branch within the CI server. The server then detects the changes and of initiates a build with the new code. The automation of this entire process has some clear benefits:

• Error discovery at the earliest
• Automated testing and validation of dependencies
• Repetition and completion of the entire process with minimal manual involvement

Automation Tools for Agile Development

As mentioned earlier, automated CI a combination of automated tools that accelerate the entire workflow. Here’s a list of tools that are key to automating a CI workflow:

• Source and version control tools that facilitate the tracking of versions, as well as the association of bugs and defects.
• Build Automation tools for compiling source code, as well as executing appropriate unit tests. Popular build automation tools for agile development include Maven, Ant and make.
• CI Servers that serve as central repositories, where the code is analysed, compiled and executed.
• Unit Testing Tools include a wide range of tools that are used as part of the CI process. Popular unit testing tools include JUnit, TestNG, and NUnit.

The world of DevOps is full of unique open source tools. While finding the best DevOps tools may takes some testing and experimentation by yourself, now you can access the best agile development resources with IT Exchange. It is an online marketplace for outsourcing agile development and DevOps. Work with the best DevOps and agile development resources globally through a simple sign-up. To know more, visit www.itexchangeweb.com.

Read Also: Sprint Ahead: Make the most of your Agile Development Methodology