Continuous integration, a litrerature review

Abstract

Adopting Continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) has become a powerful approach to help software engineers integrate, build, and test their work more frequently, resulting in faster deployments in the production side. The CI/ CD approach works within automating tools that checks the code correctness according to a setup in a software engineering pipeline before integration. Adopting CI/ CD could have numerous advantages; however, there are challenges.

This study aims to identify the benefits and challenges of adopting CI/ CD, associate these benefits and challenges to the stages within a continuous delivery pipeline (CDP), and explore whether these benefits could encourage decision makers in an organization to adopt CI/ CD. Most common challenges, which could discourage product owners from adopting CI/ CD approach, along with recommended resolutions collected from literature are listed and demonstrated.

The findings indicate that adopting continuous integration has numerous benefits that the challenges associated could be resolved with some effort and resources allocated. A total of four main benefits, and four main challenges with proposed solutions to them where found. It is also indicated that organizations are to make analysis whether these challenges could be managed and consequently decide on whether to adopt CI or not. There is a lack of research on expected cost of adopting CI/ CD and further on-depth research regarding actual costs would be needed in the future.