CI/CD (Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery)

CI/CD is a set of practices that automate the software delivery pipeline:

Continuous Integration (CI):

• Developers merge code to main branch frequently (daily+)
• Every merge triggers automated build and tests
• Broken builds are fixed immediately
• Result: always-releasable codebase

Continuous Delivery (CD):

• Every change that passes CI is automatically deployable
• Deployment to production requires manual approval
• Release process is push-button

Continuous Deployment:

• Every change that passes CI is automatically deployed to production
• No manual approval step
• Requires high confidence in automated tests

QA's role in CI/CD:

• Maintain automated test suites that run in the pipeline
• Define quality gates (tests must pass before deployment)
• Monitor test results and fix flaky tests
• Ensure adequate test coverage for confidence in automated deployment

Popular CI/CD tools: GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, CircleCI, Vercel (for frontend)

CI/CD fundamentally changes QA — instead of testing a big release every few weeks, you're continuously verifying small changes. This makes bugs smaller and easier to fix.