5 tools to complete your CI pipeline

TL;DR: A good continuous development workflow makes developers more productive by providing constant feedback during the build, deploy, and test cycle. These 5 services will complete your CI pipeline.

Continuous development

Continuous development is a process software development teams use to increase developer productivity, build and deploy code more frequently, and continuously test an application to get immediate feedback on new releases.

A complete CI pipeline is made up of three major parts:

1. Integration: Build code and run unit tests
2. Delivery: Deploy your application to a staging or production environment.
3. Testing: Run automated QA tests to validate new releases and deployments.

This post will discuss each phase of continuous development workflow and provide some tools and examples for each step. Most services mentioned below are hosted servces with free plans, particularly ones that integrate with a GitHub deployment pipeline.

Continuous integration

Continuous integration is a process for frequently building and testing new code changes. Generally, code is hosted on a central repository, like Git, that is monitoring by a CI service. When changes are detected, the CI service will pull and build the new code.

Most CI services allow you to have a configuration file checked into your repository (eg, a .travis.yml) that describes how to build your application and run the test suite. A good CI service provides several benefits:

• Ensures that code can be built and executed
• Requires that all unit tests are passing
• Immediately alerts developers of build failures.

Tools

There are many great hosted CI services that work with your existing GitHub repositories. It's worth trying a few to see what works best for your project. Two of the most widely used CI services are:

Circle CI

_Free and paid plans available._ [Website](https://circleci.com)

The modern continuous integration and delivery platform that software teams love to use. - CircleCI

Travis CI

_Free and paid plans available._ [Website](https://travis-ci.org)

Easily sync your GitHub projects with Travis CI and you’ll be testing your code in minutes! - Travis-CI

Continuous delivery

Continuous delivery is the process of deploying new versions of an application frequently, sometimes several times daily, to testing, staging, and production environments. An important part of continuous delivery is that it makes application changes more reliable by by providing a consistent, reproducable pipeline for pushing new features to your users.

Deploying an application to a staging or production environment can get hairy, but a good delivery system will provide you with the tools and automation to make it simple. Being confident about rapidly pushing code and having a good deployment process can greatly improve a product.

Tools

Like CI tools, there are a lot different services for setting up continuous delivery. One of the most powerful and widely used is Heroku Flow.

Heroku Flow

_Free and paid plans available._ [Website](https://www.heroku.com)

Heroku Flow brings together Heroku Pipelines, Review Apps and GitHub Integration into an easy to use structured workflow for continuous delivery, so you can test early and deploy often, with better results for your users. - Heroku

If your team is already using GitHub to host code, the Heroku GitHub integration provides a way to automatically deploy every pull request to a staging environment via Review Apps.

Continuous testing

The final step in a solid continuous development pipeline is automated testing and QA. Continuous testing is the process of running automated integration tests against new deployments. This gives teams and developers a way to immediately test and validate every deployment.

Take the Heroku Review App example -- when a pull request is opened on your repo, and the code is deployed to a review environment, and your automated QA tests are run against the live application to ensure the web service is working as expected.

When your application is deployed to a production environment, these same tests are run against the new release. Although a dedicated staging or testing environment is not required, it does provide huge benefits to teams who have many developers pushing to the same repo. In either case, a good continuous testing service will allow you to run post-deploy smoke tests immediately after every deployment.

Tools

Tools for continuous testing can range from manual QA teams and custom scripts for monitoring and testing API endpoints. Assertible is one hosted service that let's you create a post-deployment testing pipeline.

Assertible

_Free and paid plans available._ [Sign up for a free account](/signup)

Reduce bugs in web applications by using Assertible to create an automated QA pipeline that helps you catch failures & ship code faster. - Assertible

You are on the Assertible Blog so I might be a bit biased. Post deployment testing is, however, a crucial part of a good continuous development workflow that will enable you and your team to write better code and gain confidence in your release cycle.

Wrapping up

What tools does your continuous development pipeline consist of? Shoot us a message on Twitter and let us know!

The assertible/deployments contains more information on integrating continuous testing into your existing workflow. Check it out and sign up for a free Assertible account to start testing your deployments!

:: Cody Reichert
Cofounder @ Assertible