Appearance

CI/CD Concepts ​

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery are foundational practices that enable teams to deliver software frequently, reliably, and safely. These practices reduce integration risk, accelerate feedback loops, and make releases a routine business decision rather than a high-stakes technical event.

CI/CD Philosophy ​

At Synapse Studios, we view CI/CD as:

  • Risk reduction through frequency - Integrating and deploying often makes each change less risky
  • Fast feedback - Discover problems within minutes or hours, not weeks
  • Always releasable - Mainline stays deployable at all times
  • Business enablement - Release timing becomes a business decision, not a technical constraint

Core Practices ​

Continuous Integration ​

The discipline of integrating work frequently—multiple times per day—with automated verification to detect problems immediately.

Key Principles:

  • Frequent commits to mainline (at minimum daily, ideally many times per day)
  • Automated build and test on every commit
  • Fix broken builds immediately
  • Keep mainline always releasable
  • Work in small, stable increments using TDD

Essential Requirements:

  • Comprehensive automated test suite
  • Trunk-based development (no long-lived branches)
  • Fast build times (under 10 minutes for commit stage)
  • Team discipline and cultural commitment
  • Feature flags for incomplete work

Continuous Delivery ​

Building software so it can be released to production at any time through automated deployment pipelines.

The Deployment Pipeline:

  • Commit Stage - Fast feedback (under 10 minutes) with unit tests and packaging
  • Acceptance Stage - Automated business requirement verification
  • Optional Stages - Performance, security, manual exploratory testing
  • Production Deployment - Manual trigger (CD) or automatic (Continuous Deployment)

Key Capabilities:

  • Software remains deployable throughout development
  • Push-button deployment to any environment
  • Fast, automated feedback on production readiness
  • Release timing as a business decision, not technical constraint

The Relationship ​

Continuous Integration is the foundation for Continuous Delivery:

Continuous Integration
        ↓
   (enables)
        ↓
Continuous Delivery

You cannot practice Continuous Delivery without first mastering Continuous Integration. CI ensures mainline is always releasable, which is a prerequisite for CD.

Further Reading ​

Books ​

Articles ​

Resources ​