One of the biggest blockages to rapid reliable delivery of change in software products has traditionally been the QA, infrastructure provisioning, deployment, configuration and operation of system upgrades and installations. The development and low level functional testing has largely been solved by agile development. New candidate builds then suffer from severe slow-down caused by the list of phases given above, often implemented using traditional waterfall style silos.

Continuous integration and continuous delivery use a combination of test automation with build, provisioning, deployment and operational automation to make it possible to whip a new release out to production after full testing within hours rather than months.

This course looks at the tools, principles and best practices used in setting up and running a CI/CD pipeline within an agile or DevOps software delivery life cycle. It focuses on how to optimise the pipeline and how to instil best practices for its use and maintenance.

The course is presented as a combination of taught material (50%), with small group activities, and hands-on use of software tools as part of a simulated development project (50%). The tools used in the case study are Git, Jenkins (a variant of Bamboo) and various Jenkins plug-ins. However, these tools are merely representative of the vast number of similar tools on the market today.