Software development is complex, but your workflow doesn't have to be. As teams grow and projects scale, it's important to manage the frequent integration of code changes from multiple developers into a shared source code repository. Modern DevOps practices, including Continuous Integration, become essential for maintaining speed without sacrificing quality.
In this blog, we explain what is continuous integration (CI), how continuous integration works, and how to successfully implement it.
Read along or jump ahead to the section that interests you the most:
Table of Contents
- What Is Continuous Integration?
- How Continuous Integration Works
- Benefits of Continuous Integration Systems
- Continuous Integration vs Continuous Delivery
- Why Continuous Integration Is Critical for Modern Development
- Key Tools for Continuous Integration
- Enhancing CI Pipelines With Static Analysis
- How Perforce Klocwork and Perforce QAC Complement Continuous Integration
What Is Continuous Integration?
Continuous Integration (CI) is the practice of automating the build and testing of code every time a change is made — and committing that code back to a central repository.
By breaking up development tasks into small, bite-sized pieces that are performed frequently, teams can detect defects early and deliver software faster.
Each new code commit triggers a consistent, automated build and test process — often called a “pipeline” — to report any defects found during compilation or testing as quickly as possible. CI is one of the key components of DevOps automation.
Continuous Integration Best Practices
Improve the quality of your CI pipeline by adopting CI/CD best practices. Get our eBook to learn how!
How Continuous Integration Works
At its core, CI is about consistency and automation. Instead of developers working in isolation for weeks and attempting to merge massive changes at the end of a sprint, CI encourages frequent updates.
Each time a developer commits code to the shared repository, it triggers an automated process (CI pipeline). This CI pipeline compiles the code and runs a suite of automated tests to verify that the new changes haven't broken existing functionality. If a defect is found during compilation or testing, the system reports it immediately. This allows the developer to fix the issue while the code is still fresh in their mind, rather than discovering it weeks later.
Back to topBenefits of Continuous Integration Systems
Adopting a CI workflow offers tangible advantages that go beyond simple automation. It fundamentally shifts how teams approach software quality and delivery. Here are some benefits of CI:
Easier Bug Fixes
Identifying issues sooner makes it easier for developers to fix errors, vulnerabilities, and defects in the code. Because changes are incremental, isolating the root cause of a bug is straightforward. This ensures that issues are resolved correctly, resulting in a cleaner, more stable build.
Reduced Project Risk
Encouraging small, modular changes to the code enables new functionality to be backed out of a release more quickly. You can even prevent it from entering the main code stream altogether. This minimizes the impact on other developers.
Improved Software Quality
Maximizing the value of CI means detecting as many issues as possible in each integration build, through automation. This increases the breadth, depth, and repeatability of the tests while avoiding manual testing.
📕 Related Resource: Learn more about What Is Continuous Integration Automation? An Overview
Increased Productivity
Automating these tasks frees up developers to focus on higher-value feature development.
Back to topContinuous Integration vs Continuous Delivery
Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery or Deployment (CD) are both software development practices. While often mentioned together as CI/CD, these two concepts serve different phases of the development lifecycle. Having an effective CI/CD process is important.
Continuous Integration focuses on the build and test phase. Its goal is to ensure that code changes are valid and do not introduce errors.
Continuous Delivery takes over once changes are committed and verified. It automates the release process, ensuring that validated code is always ready for deployment. The ultimate aim of CD is to always have validated and verified code in the code repository — or version control system — ready for release.
Back to topWhy Continuous Integration Is Critical for Modern Development
Continuous integration is important because it accelerates software development and helps developers to avoid these common pitfalls:
- Frequent code integration helps to eliminate code conflicts and code incompatibility.
- Developers are encouraged to have the most up-to-date repository code when working.
- Reduces the refactoring complexity.
- Helps to identify issues, such as memory leaks.
- Quality gates ensure only clean, working, and tested code makes it to the repository.
- Reduces repository commit bottlenecks.
With a CI pipeline, every change is integrated, tested, and verified. This brings the commit closer to being a viable release candidate.
Back to topKey Tools for Continuous Integration
A successful CI pipeline relies on the right tools to automate and streamline workflows. Here are some widely used CI tools:
- Jenkins: An open-source tool offering extensive plugins to customize pipelines.
- GitLab CI/CD: A comprehensive tool to manage code, CI pipelines, and delivery in one platform.
- GitHub Actions: Built into GitHub, enabling teams to create CI/CD workflows directly in their repositories.
- CircleCI: Known for its flexibility and ease of setup, particularly for cloud-based projects.
- Travis CI: A popular choice for open-source projects, offering simple integration with GitHub.
Static analysis tools can be used together with CI tools. For example, you can use Perforce QAC with GitLab and Klocwork with GitLab to optimize CI pipelines.
Back to topEnhancing CI Pipelines With Static Analysis
Static code analysis is a natural addition to any continuous integration development process. A static analysis tool provides almost immediate feedback on new coding issues. These can be specific to the branch or commit containing them. You'll be able to use quality gates to prevent those issues from ever entering the main codestream — where they would need to be resolved later. This improves development efficiency.
Static analysis complements other verification and validation techniques, such as dynamic testing, because:
- Static analysis provides coverage of all possible execution paths.
- Static analysis is very cost-efficient in terms of detecting bugs earlier in the lifecycle. It requires much less time to run.
- Issues detected with static analysis, prior to dynamic tests being written, also saves downstream costs of rework. Most dynamic tests are quite dependent on the code itself. A change has an impact also on the tests.
The ideal static analysis tool for continuous integration:
- Processes only modified code and affected execution paths, rather than processing the entire codebase all the time.
- Reports the impact of those changes.
Static code analysis operates on source code and doesn’t have to actually execute the code. So, it can perform a complete analysis of the submitted code changes in a specific time frame. In addition, static code analysis doesn’t require specific test cases to be written.
To be effective in complementing continuous integration, a static code analysis tool must be fast, scalable, and automated.
In the following webinar recording, we show you how to integrate static analysis tools into your CI/CD workflow.
Video recording explaining best practices for the integration of static analysis into CI/CD pipelines.
Ready to implement static analysis into your CI/CD workflow? Get a copy of our 6-step checklist.
Back to topHow Perforce Klocwork and Perforce QAC Complement Continuous Integration
Klocwork and QAC are the ideal static code analyzers to support CI and CI pipelines.
Klocwork, a SAST tool built for large code bases for C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Python, and Kotlin, integrates with build systems and continuous integration environments along with its unique differential analysis technology provides the fastest analysis results for CI pipelines. See how Klocwork can help, register for a free trial.
QAC, a static analysis tool built for accuracy and continuous coding standards compliance for C and C++, provides full integration support with Delta Analysis in the Validate platform, so developers can manage results from CI/CD analyses to identify any defects introduced by new changes. See how QAC can help, register for a free trial.