Understanding the continuous build and test phases of DevOps

In the opening chapter of this book, we talked about the five core practices of DevOps. The third practice that we covered was continuous integration, or CI for short. CI is a development practice where developers integrate source code changes frequently by committing and pushing code into a shared repository. Each code commit then goes through an automated code validation process. The goal is to ensure that new code changes are continuously validated to ensure they integrate well with the existing code base and do not introduce any errors.

Figure 6.1 shows an example of this. In this scenario, a developer commits code changes to a feature branch they are working on (for example, chatbot or search) and pushes the changes to the central repository (marked as 1 in Figure 6.1). This push action initiates an automated build and test process (marked as 2 in Figure 6.1). The CI system pulls the latest code (including the new...