How to keep up with CI/CD best practices

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Updated on: September 29, 2025
In this post, we look at continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD), how to implement some best practices, and why it is important.
Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) are at the heart of any successful DevSecOps practice. Teams wanting to achieve modern software development must keep up with CI/CD best practices. Here's what you need to know to make sure your team is on the right track.
It's a tech process, it's a mindset, it's a series of steps... CI/CD is all of those things. Put simply, continuous integration (CI) enables DevSecOps teams to streamline code development using automation. CI simplifies software builds and source code integration, enables version control, and promotes greater collaboration via automation. Where CI leaves off, continuous delivery (CD) kicks in with automated testing and deployment. Not only does CD reduce the amount of hands-on time ops pros need to spend on delivery and deployment, it also enables teams to drastically reduce the number of tools required to manage the lifecycle. By integrating security scanning and compliance checks early in the pipeline, CI/CD enables a shift-left security approach that identifies and resolves issues before they reach production.
If you want to be successful with CI/CD, make continuous integration, delivery, and deployment your mantra as they are the cornerstones of software development practices. The goal of DevSecOps is to get software to users more quickly than traditional methods, and these development practices will help make that happen. Here are the most essential practices, ranked by importance:
Continuous delivery/deployment feels like it deserves its own deep dive into best practices because CI often steals most of the headlines. Here are essential CD best practices:
A CI/CD pipeline is the automated series of steps that takes code from development to production. The typical pipeline includes: build, test, security scan, deploy, and monitor. While these steps can be done manually, automation is what makes CI/CD truly valuable. If it's time to optimize your CI/CD pipeline, consider these performance enhancements:
Remember that CI/CD is about getting a software application into the hands of a customer that is better and done quicker than before. Organizations that adopt CI/CD find their productivity improves significantly. The trick is coming up with a deployment strategy that works for the individual organization. Here are some strategies to help make a deployment successful:
DevSecOps teams can't know how well their CI/CD practices are going unless they measure them. Metrics play an important role in improving system performance and helping to identify where value can be added. Here are the essential metrics to employ:
Modern teams rely on the DORA framework, which identifies four key metrics that correlate strongly with organizational performance:
How often your team successfully releases code to production. Elite performers deploy multiple times per day, while high performers deploy daily to weekly. This metric indicates your team's ability to deliver value and respond to market demands.
Time from code commit to production deployment. Elite performers achieve lead times under one day, high performers range from one day to one week. If commits take weeks to reach production, your pipeline needs optimization.
Percentage of deployments causing production failures requiring hotfixes or rollbacks. Elite performers maintain up to 15% failure rates, high performers see 16%-30%. High failure rates indicate quality problems in your testing and deployment practices.
How quickly your team restores service after deployment failures. Elite performers recover in under one hour, high performers in under one day. Fast recovery requires robust monitoring and automated rollback capabilities.
Beyond the core DORA metrics, teams often track these operational indicators:
Cloud-native CI/CD can result in significant expenses if not managed properly. Efficient practices that reduce build times and optimize resource usage directly impact operational costs.
Happy developers stick around. When teams collaborate effectively on CI/CD practices, retention follows. Declining retention rates can signal problems with tooling or deployment workflows that developers may hesitate to voice directly.
These technical metrics directly translate to business outcomes:
The DORA research program has found that high-performing organizations consistently demonstrate better business outcomes across multiple dimensions.
Teams with strong CI/CD metrics report improved productivity, better customer satisfaction, and enhanced ability to compete in fast-moving markets.
When best practices are followed, the benefits of CI/CD are felt most importantly by your customers, and then throughout your organization. Here are the key benefits:
The internal benefits naturally follow: happier developers, better collaboration between teams, reduced operational overhead, and easier talent retention — all of which ultimately contribute to delivering better customer experiences.
Before any software is implemented, it's key to determine what the business drivers are and the same goes for adopting CI/CD. All development stakeholders should be involved early on in the implementation process. Developers should provide input since they will be the main users of a product.
Make sure to do your due diligence when researching software that enables CI/CD, and ask about free trials.
While it may seem counterintuitive since CI/CD is about accelerating the pace of software delivery in an automated fashion, start the process with a mentality of slow and steady. The boost in efficiency will decline if bugs are steadily moving into the