With fast-moving technology and agile development teams, shipping features faster and more reliably is essential. Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery, or CI/CD, has become a common practice for DevOps teams that need to manage frequent code changes without slowing down releases.
A CI/CD process helps teams manage code changes moving into shared branches, QA environments, staging environments, and production. When a codebase is large or changing often, a CI/CD pipeline helps reduce conflicts, catch defects earlier, and create a repeatable build and deployment process for the full project.
Continuous Integration and Benefits
Continuous Integration, or CI, is a development process where code is integrated into a shared repository frequently, often several times a day. The goal is to make completed or fixed code available to other developers quickly while using automated builds and tests to verify that the code behaves as expected.
A typical continuous integration process includes the following steps:
- Review source code from the main branch.
- Run automated unit tests.
- Run the build sequence and decide whether to accept or reject the build.
- Deploy to a test or QA environment.
- Promote the build toward staging or production when it meets release criteria.
In this way, CI allows developers to integrate changes into the main branch and verify them with automated tools like Jenkins before they move further through the development lifecycle. Some major benefits of continuous integration include:
Proactive Bug Detection
Automated unit tests and build checks allow developers to discover bugs early through build failures or test failures. This helps QA teams receive more stable builds and reduces the risk of avoidable defects moving downstream.
Fewer Bugs
Continuous integration helps teams detect bugs earlier and fix them before builds move to the next stage. With effective automated tests and a reliable build process, fewer bugs go unnoticed until late QA or production.
Code Quality Optimization
CI gives developers fast feedback about what is going wrong and what needs improvement. Because the code is still fresh, developers can make changes quickly and improve quality before issues become harder to fix.
Time Efficiency
CI uses automation for testing and building, which reduces manual work. Developers do not need to rely only on manual unit testing or late-stage feedback, both of which can be slower and less reliable.
Cost Efficiency
Early bug detection can reduce QA rework, production issues, and emergency fixes. That helps control project costs and reduces the risk of defects affecting users or business revenue.
Continuous Delivery and Benefits
Continuous Delivery, or CD, is the process of keeping software in a release-ready state. It builds on CI by helping teams deploy small, frequent changes through a controlled and repeatable process. While CI verifies that code integrates successfully, CD helps ensure the code can be released quickly, safely, and predictably.
Continuous delivery often includes the following best practices:
- Build the package once so there is clarity about what was tested and what is being deployed.
- Use the same deployment process across environments to reduce environment-specific issues.
- Run smoke tests to check key dependencies and availability.
- Keep environments as consistent as possible across the development lifecycle to prevent avoidable production issues.
The continuous delivery process helps ensure that code is stable, lower risk, and ready to deploy while developers continue working on other features or fixes. Some key benefits include:
Faster Deployment With Lower Risk
Continuous delivery supports safer and faster deployments by using repeatable deployment patterns, automated checks, and smaller release units.
Reduced Downtime
A well-designed CI/CD pipeline can support releases with little to no downtime, especially when combined with deployment strategies such as blue-green deployments, rolling deployments, canary releases, or feature flags.
Higher Quality
Automated CI/CD processes allow developers and testers to focus more on code quality, usability, security, performance, and reliability.
Reduced Cost
Deployment involves multiple stages throughout the product lifecycle. Costs related to frequent issues, manual work, and late bug fixes can be reduced when CI/CD helps teams detect problems and make improvements earlier.
Why Should Organizations Automate Testing?
Automated testing is not the only part of CI/CD, but it is essential if teams want to get the full benefit from the pipeline. More DevOps teams are adopting CI/CD with automated testing because manual testing alone cannot keep up with frequent releases.
Automated testing helps teams by providing:
- Faster feedback for agile teams shipping frequent updates.
- Easier regression testing compared with manual testing alone.
- Reusable test cases that improve productivity.
- The ability to run many test cases around the clock.
- Data-driven testing with useful reports.
- Testing across multiple platforms, browsers, and environments.
- Faster bug identification and shorter MTTR, or mean time to resolution.
- Reduced time to market and lower business cost.
- Cross-browser and geo-location testing.
- Better coverage for complex and lengthy test cases.
Importance of Load Testing With CI/CD
Load testing is essential for production readiness, but integrating it with the CI/CD pipeline can reduce the time and effort required for performance testing. The goal is to script critical transactions realistically and test them under different load scenarios before users are affected.
A build may pass all functional tests, but that does not mean it will perform well under traffic. If code is shipped without load testing, a new release could slow down your website when high traffic arrives. Deploying through CI/CD is only part of release readiness. The build should also meet response time, error rate, throughput, and stability targets.
If performance testing happens only after deployment, teams may discover problems after the user experience is already affected. Adding load testing earlier in the pipeline helps catch regressions before they become production incidents.
Understanding how an application behaves under load is a key part of successful delivery. CI/CD load testing helps teams validate whether the application can handle expected traffic, peak demand, and critical user journeys.
LoadView and Jenkins for CI/CD Automated Load Testing
Jenkins is a widely used automation server for CI/CD pipelines. It is open source and supports plugins for builds, deployments, automation testing, reporting, and many other pipeline tasks. LoadView is a cloud-based load testing platform for websites, applications, and APIs, with support for real browser testing and geo-location testing.
Compare LoadView to the other load testing tools and solutions in the market today.
Set Up a LoadView Load Test With Jenkins
- Sign up for the free LoadView trial or log in to your account if you already have a LoadView account.
- Go to your LoadView account and set up a load test scenario. Note the test scenario ID. The setup flow helps refine your load test by verifying that your device runs without errors, adding user behavior profiles, choosing load curves, selecting load injector payload, and configuring other test details. Learn more about choosing the right type of load curve.
- For this example, create a load testing task for an API. In LoadView, create an Integration Web API.
- Go to Jenkins and configure the LoadView plugin.
- Select the desired job and configure the LoadView test scenario by going to Build > Post-build Actions.
- View test results in Jenkins Console Output in real time.
- Check the result summary after the test finishes under LoadView Results in the Jenkins build menu.
- Accept or reject the build. LoadView provides information about how the build performed against the load test, including test duration, max users, number of sessions, successful tests, failed tests, and related results. Based on these results and your benchmarked parameters, you can decide whether the build should move forward.
You can find detailed steps for setting up the LoadView plugin with Jenkins in our LoadView Plugin for Jenkins Knowledge Base article.
CI/CD Load Testing: Conclusion
CI/CD, combined with automated load testing, helps teams release new product features and enhancements faster while reducing production risk. Functional tests can confirm that features work, but load tests help confirm that those features continue to perform under expected traffic, peak demand, and critical user journeys.
Jenkins can automate the CI/CD pipeline, and the LoadView plugin can help teams include performance validation as part of the build process. LoadView supports real browser testing, geo-location testing, and load curves that help teams evaluate whether a build is ready to move forward.
Sign up for the LoadView free trial and begin the process of ensuring your applications and systems are ready to handle heavy traffic. The trial comes with up to 5 free load tests to get started.
Or, if you would rather walk through the platform with one of our performance engineers, you can schedule a demo. Our team can walk you through the LoadView platform, answer questions, and provide best practices for your testing requirements.