Continuous development, like agile, has emerged as one of the preferred software development methodologies amongst developers across the globe. That’s because it simplifies the software development processes, leading to quality product development.
Unlike other development methodologies where software gets developed in a single large batch, continuous development follows a way in which updates are made continuously, hence, improving the quality of a software product that can satisfy the user’s needs.
Organizations successfully implementing continuous development through the software development process are more likely to get amazing benefits. In this article, we’re going to let you know all you should know about continuous development in DevOps. Keep reading on!
To put it in a nutshell, continuous development is a kind of software development process that tends to encompass several DevOps processes, for instance, continuous integration, continuous delivery, continuous deployment, and continuous testing.
The CSD (continuous software development) shares a multitude of traits with agile development methodology which involves being iterative, automated, and faster to deliver. It focuses on the idea of continuous software development intending to improve the product’s quality.
The CSD can be described as a cycle that consists of planning, developing, and delivering software to a client. It aims at accumulating feedback and acting on it accordingly to ensure developing quality products.
As the paragraph above suggests, continuous development revolves around four factors including continuous integration, continuous delivery, continuous testing, and continuous deployment. Let’s understand them in detail!
In continuous integration, new code gets continually added to a source code. It involves putting through a multitude of automated units as well as integration testing methodologies to ensure it doesn’t end up causing the product to crash.
With this approach, developers can easily and timelessly learn whether their code is capable of meeting the requirements for deployment, leading to ensuring quality software product delivery.
The next factor of continuous development is continuous delivery which tends to automate the process from the initiation of the product development to its completion which continues through each testing phase, too.
When a software product has passed through different tests, it gets forwarded to the staging environment for manual testing.
Continuous testing is one of the most significant aspects of software development—as it ensures checking all the different aspects of the software. The process ensures the development and delivery of a quality code.
The significant facet of continuous testing is that it enables developers to have quick feedback on whether their code is robust enough to be moved on to the next phase towards delivery or not.
The continuous deployment is similar to the continuous delivery, however, it’s slightly different from the former. In this, the code isn’t provided to a staging environment, rather it’s deployed right to a production environment.
The process may seem to be a bit risky, however, if you have a robust and qualified team of developers, it can make the process way more beneficial for your software development initiative.
There are plenty of benefits of continuous development, however, below mentioned are some of them.
Reduced chances of software errors happen to be one of the major benefits of continuous development. When you’ve measured frequent updates, your team of developers is more likely to be able to run various tests intending to identify errors, and vulnerabilities in a software product.
It enables you to make sure that the issues with software products get fixed conveniently and timelessly. Furthermore, it ends up delivering software that is free of glitches and performs as expected.
The next benefit of continuous development is increased software quality. When having an automated DevOps process in place, you’re more likely to be capable of making updates and adding new features to software products timelessly.
Apart from that, making continuous updates lets you test new iterations faster, enabling you to pinpoint errors, vulnerabilities, and inefficiencies, early on in your development procedure. It, furthermore, elevates the depth, and repeatability of your software product testing.
Another benefit of continuous development is reduced requirements for resources. When you need major updates in software development, you may require a wide array of resources, but with continuous development, it’s not the case.
Continuous software development relies on automated development procedures aiming to improve overall efficiency and lessen the effort as well as the time involved in deploying a new software product.
Reduced risk is another one of the benefits of continuous development. When you make small and incremental updates to a software product, you become capable of identifying whether the changes you make are effective with no performance glitch, and if they aren’t, you can remove them from the project.
It allows you to mitigate the impact of making changes on the other developers in your software development team.
Last but not least, improved productivity is another one of the benefits of continuous development. When you have frequent feedback, a clear and concise understanding of the project, and automated continuous development in DevOps, you can free up your developers to focus more attention on other high-value development features.
This is which has the potential to speed up the overall productivity of your development team enabling you to deliver quality software products.
As you’ve been through the benefits of continuous development in software development, you’re more likely to raise a question like what’s the importance of it in software development. Mainly, continuous development is essential because it accelerates the process of software development by:
That’s all there’s to it! When you’ve implemented continuous development, each one of the changes to your software is likely to be integrated, tested, and verified. It assists you in making sure your software development team releases safe, secure, reliable, and high-performance software.
In this article, we’ve analyzed many aspects, thereby, trying to answer all the questions relating to what is continuous development in DevOps. Hopefully, you’re familiar with continuous development, so make sure to use it and improve your software development experience. If you’re looking to enhance your capabilities, don’t hesitate to hire DevOps engineers to ensure your team has the expertise needed to succeed.
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