CI/CD Pipeline: Improving the CI/CD Process

A CI/CD pipeline is essential to accelerating delivery without sacrificing quality.

Here we take a closer look at Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery, explain what is a CI/CD pipeline, and why static analysis improves CI/CD.

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➡️ Manage Your ci/cd pipeline with Static Analysis

What Is a CI/CD Pipeline?

CI/CD pipelines are software engineering approaches that are a part of the larger software delivery pipeline.

Put simply, Continuous Integration (CI) is the practice of merging each developers' working copies of code together in a shared mainline several times throughout the day. While Continuous Delivery (CD) refers to the regular, frequent delivery of software functionalities.

These pipelines form the backbone of DevOps automation.

Additionally, quality assurance and security checking can easily be integrated into the CI/CD process. The goal is for developers to receive immediate feedback on any issues found within their most recent code revisions. Fixes can be made at the earliest opportunity (and lowest cost). This all helps ensure the delivery of high-quality, reliable, and competitive software products on time.

Best Practices For CI/CD Pipelines

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Why Is Static Analysis Necessary for a CI/CD Pipeline?

Static analysis inspects your source code to identify defects, vulnerabilities, and compliance issues as you code — without having to run the program. This makes static analysis an essential component of your pipeline.

Static analysis helps with:

• Detection of common security vulnerabilities, including those highlighted by security coding standards such as CERT, CWE, DISA STIG, and OWASP.
• Early detection of potential runtime errors. These include memory leaks, concurrency violations, or uninitialized data — all of which can cause system failures.
• Compliance with safety-related coding standards, such as MISRA and AUTOSAR.
• Enforcement of company or project-wide coding guidelines or naming conventions, and maintainability requirements.

📕Related Resource: The CI/CD best practices that will help your CI/CD pipeline quality.

Why Differential Analysis Is Beneficial for Your CI/CD Pipeline

Most code edits only change a tiny fraction of the total amount of code in a project. But minor changes can still have a large impact on the overall system.

A single developer’s local analysis of a changed source file may not flag any issues. However, the changes may still lead to issues that can only be detected through complete, system-wide analysis.

With a traditional static analyzer, the only way to find these issues is to perform an analysis of the entire, merged codebase. The time to complete this analysis will grow in proportion to the size and complexity of the project. This means that as the project grows, the time taken to feed issues back to developers will increase. This makes it harder to achieve your goal.

Klocwork Is the Only Static Analyzer That Solves This Problem

Klocwork maintains system-wide knowledge of the code in a centralized server. This means it only needs to analyze the small part of the code that has changed in order to work out if there are any resulting system-wide issues.

This means that Klocwork can analyze 1,000s of source files and 10s of millions of lines of code in a matter of seconds — not hours. What’s more, differential static analysis provides developers with the shortest possible analysis time. And it provides an impact analysis of the changes — no matter how large the codebase.

For that reason, adding static analysis to every pipeline is practical, efficient, and helps to ensure that there is no need to trade feedback times for quality and security.

📕 Related Resource: Learn more about the benefits of Differential Analysis.

How Can a CI/CD Pipeline Save Cloud Computing Costs?

In general, the cost of a pipeline grows in proportion to its execution times. Klocwork’s differential analysis dramatically reduces execution times. So, it also reduces cloud computing costs.

Klocwork's differential analysis applies even if you are using an internal cloud computing resource, such as OpenStack. When deploying static code analysis in your pipeline, Klocwork’s differential analysis provides results fast.

How to Improve Your CI/CD Pipeline With Static Code Analysis

Klocwork is the ideal static analyzer for your pipelines. Its unique differential analysis technology provides the fastest analysis results for your pipelines.

By using Klocwork, you can:

• Ensure complex software is safe, secure, and reliable.
• Reduce the cost of finding and fixing defects earlier in development.
• Prove compliance by enforcing software coding standards.
• Improve developer productivity, testing efforts, and velocity of software delivery.
• Report on quality over time and across product versions.

See how your pipelines can benefit from Klocwork, register for a free trial.

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Related Resources

• Learn about using tools to find code vulnerabilities, ensure standards compliance, and reduce time-to-market early in the development process with Perforce's Shift Left 101