Continuous integration and continuous delivery

Author: Zuzana Kocáková

Digitization

8 reading minutes

The practice of continuous integration and delivery of software systems enables rapid and less costly development of high quality software solutions. Insurers need to accelerate the pace of innovation to remain competitive and stay one step ahead. However, insurers’ core systems are complex applications and implementing new requirements takes a lot of time and money. Automating the process of delivering software releases allows them to be delivered smoothly in shorter cycles.

Continuous delivery: Software releases one after another

Digital transformation and its challenges are putting constant pressure on the insurance sector. New providers are penetrating the financial and insurance markets with innovative services. New products and services need to be developed and marketed ever more quickly so that businesses can remain competitive and stay one step ahead. Added to this are new regulatory rules that often need to be implemented at short notice. Insurers need to increase the pace of innovation as well as the speed and flexibility in delivering new products.

Stable and high-quality software systems that are always up-to-date and can be adapted to new requirements as quickly as possible are a prerequisite for this. But insurers’ core systems are highly complex applications, and implementing new requirements requires a lot of time and money. Development and delivery of software versions usually take too long. It is a risky and error-prone process, with many repetitive tasks still being performed manually. Maintaining sustainable quality is also an ongoing challenge.

Continuous delivery as a basis for accelerated software releases

How can this process be accelerated so that new software features are available in a short period of time, regardless of whether the requirements are technical, regulatory or domain specific? Using continuous delivery and continuous integration. These two strategies play a key role as central elements of agile software development. The practice of continuous integration and delivery establishes the principles and technical methods that enable rapid, low-risk, and efficient development and delivery of new software features.

In this way, new requirements can be made available expressly and at minimal cost. Continuous delivery describes the development of a fast, reproducible and reliable process to simplify and accelerate software accessibility. In doing so, continuous delivery itself relies heavily on the automation of the entire access process. This not only shortens the process as a whole, but also reduces the number of errors that negatively affect the operation of the software.

Quick feedback – fast response

Continuous integration allows changes to the software source code to be made using automated integration and end-to-end tests that have been implemented before the software is released. Developers get feedback on code changes in a short time and can fix any bugs in a timely manner.

The results are then also available to all other programmers involved in the software. This gives everyone an overview of the current state of development. By automating the build, deployment and testing processes and improving collaboration between developers, testers and IT departments, teams can make changes available on a daily basis, regardless of the size of the product or the complexity of IT architectures.

msg life builds on continuous delivery

Agile software development is a high priority at msg life. For this reason, it goes without saying that continuous delivery and continuous integration should be used to develop and deliver software releases. The software application is divided into many smaller bootable units such as docker containers, which display a single specialist function and can be commissioned separately. The use of docker container technology enables an elegant implementation of the immutable deployment strategy, which aims to use the same deployment in all phases of development and to rule out potential problems in advance.

The deployment pipeline, which includes all the processing and verification phases that the software goes through until its release, is fully automated. The system ensures that changes made by developers to the software code actually reach the end user as intended, and as quickly and as high quality as possible. In this process, every change is directly integrated into the entire system.

Benefits of continuous delivery

• Shorter software release times and thus more frequent commissioning.
• The ability to quickly correct errors.
• Continuous improvement and quality assurance.
• No release risks (in terms of deadlines, quality, budget, migration, etc.).
• Fewer manual processes, manual testing runs in parallel.
• Continuous rapid feedback allows immediate problem solving.
• The customization can continue simultaneously without interrupting the delivery of releases.
• Lower costs thanks to a fully automated process.

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Continuous integration and continuous delivery

Zuzana Kocáková

At msg life Slovakia I take care of the company culture, events and I am part of the marketing team. I like a job where I can be creative and contribute to making my colleagues at msg feel good. I regularly prepare for you not only news and interesting things from the world of information technology and insurance, but also from behind the scenes events at msg life Slovakia.