What Is Continuous Development?

Continuous development is an umbrella term that includes many DevOps processes. For that reason, it is important to understand what is continuous development in DevOps to help you ensure that each of your DevOps processes are efficient and effective.

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What Is Continuous Development in DevOps?

Continuous development is a software development process that encompasses multiple DevOps processes, including continuous integration, continuous testing, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment.

At its core, continuous development automates the software lifecycle. It removes manual handoffs and creates a seamless pipeline where code flaws from a developer's workstation to the end user with minimal friction. Instead of releasing massive updates once a quarter (the "waterfall" approach), teams release small, incremental changes frequently — sometimes multiple times a day. 

This approach helps to enforce steady, manageable iterations, allowing teams to react to changes instantly and fix small bugs before they turn into expensive problems. 

📕 Related Resource: Continuous Delivery vs. Deployment — What's the Difference? 

What Are the Benefits of Continuous Development in DevOps?

The benefits of continuous development are:

Improves Software Quality

With automated DevOps processes in place, you are able to make updates and add new features to your product quickly and easily. What’s more, by making continuous, measured updates, you are able to test each new iteration as soon as possible to identify errors, inefficiencies, and vulnerabilities early in development. This increases the breadth, depth, and repeatability of your tests.

Makes it Easier to Fix Software Errors, Vulnerabilities, and Bugs

Making measured, continuous updates enables your team to more easily run tests to identify errors, vulnerabilities, and defects in your code. This helps you to ensure that an issue will be fixed early and correctly. In addition, this results in a product that’s issue free and working as quickly as possible.

Reduces Project Risk

By making small, incremental updates to your software, you are able to identify whether the changes are effective and defect free, and — if not — remove them from the project. This helps to minimize the impact of changes on other developers within the team.

Improved Productivity

With continuous feedback, a clear understanding of the project, and automated continuous development DevOps processes, you are able to free up your developers to focus on more high-value feature developments.

Why Is Continuous Development Important In Software Development?

The software landscape is continuously evolving. Legacy release cycles cannot compete with agile competitors who leverage continuous development.

Deployment frequency is part of how DevOps teams can implement DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) metrics, which includes continuous development. Teams who adopt these practices see 208 times more frequent code deployments, according to the latest DORA report. 

Continuous development is important because it helps to accelerate software development by:

• Eliminating code conflicts and code incompatibilities early.
• Providing developers with immediate feedback on changes.
• Identifying vulnerabilities, errors, and defects early in development.
• Enforcing quality gates.

With continuous development, every change to your software is may be integrated, tested, and verified. This helps to ensure that your team is able to release a safe, secure, reliable, and high-quality product on time.

How Does Static Analysis Extend Continuous Development?

A static analysis tool — like Perforce Klocwork — is a beneficial addition to continuous development because it scans code as it is being written to provide you with near real-time feedback of any new coding issues and vulnerabilities.

Step-by-Step Integration in a Continuous Integration/Continuous Development (CI/CD) Pipeline

To visualize how static analysis protects your continuous development pipeline, let's walk through a typical workflow: 

1. The Commit: A developer finishes a task and commits code to the version control system (e.g., Git). 
2. The Trigger: The CI server (e.g., Jenkins) detects the change and initiates a build.
3. The Scan (Differential Analysis): Before the build completes, the static analysis tool scans only the modified files and affected execution paths. This keeps the feedback loop fast. 
4. The Quality Gate: The pipeline evaluates the scan results against defined quality gates. For example, if the tool finds a critical security vulnerability like a buffer overflow, the build fails automatically, and the developer gets an alert with the exact line of code to fix. Or, if the code is clean or contains only minor style warnings, the build passes and moves to the testing environment. 
5. The Result: Bad code never reaches the shared repository or production environment. 

For a more in-depth walkthrough of implementing static analysis into your CI/CD pipelines, watch the webinar recording below. 

📕 Related Resource: You can also use this Best Practices Checklist for CI/CD Static Analysis Integration. 

Static analysis complements many of the DevOps processes in continuous development because:

• Static analysis provides coverage of all possible execution paths, which complements more traditional dynamic testing efforts, which tend to focus on testing the commonly executed paths and features.
• Static code analysis is cost-efficient as it detects coding errors, vulnerabilities, and defects earlier in the software development lifecycle and with very little additional effort.
• Static analysis can be easily automated as part of existing CI/CD processes.
• Static analysis saves downstream costs of rework or retesting.

In order to effectively complement continuous development, a static code analysis tool must be able to quickly scan your codebase, effectively scale to your project, regardless of its size, and automate as part of the DevOps processes. For that reason, we recommend that the ideal static code analysis tool for continuous development be able to:

• Processes only modified code and affected execution paths, rather than processing the entire codebase for each small change, which improves feedback time and efficiency.
• Produces reports on the impact of the changes made to your codebase as they are committed, focusing the developer or reviewer on the issues that matter to them.

📕 Related Resource: Read our Guide to CI/CD Processes

How Klocwork Complements Continuous Development

Klocwork is a static code analysis and SAST tool for C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Python, and Kotlin that integrates with build systems and continuous development environments to identify software security, quality, and reliability issues.

With its unique differential analysis technology, Klocwork provides you with the fastest analysis results for continuous development and DevOps processes. What’s more, by using Klocwork, you can:

• Ensure complex software is safe, secure, and reliable.
• Reduce the cost of development by finding and fixing defects earlier in the cycle.
• Prove compliance to and enforcing software coding standards.
• Improve development productivity, testing efforts, and velocity of software delivery.
• Report on quality over time and across project versions and teams.

See how Klocwork can improve continuous development for yourself by signing up for an on-demand demo.

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