Continuous integration and continuous delivery pipeline automation for agile software project management

Abstract

Agile practices with Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CICD) pipeline approach has increased the efficiency of projects. In agile, new features are introduced to the system in each sprint delivery, and although it may be well developed, the delivery failures are possible due to performance issues. By considering delivery timeline, moving for system scaling is common solution in such situations. But, how much system should be scaled? System scale requires current system benchmark status and expected system status. Benchmarking the production is a critical task, as it interrupts the live system. The new version should go through a load test to measure expected system status. The traditional load test methods are unable to identify production performance behavior due to simulated traffic patterns are highly deviated from production. To overcome those issues, this approach has extended CICD pipeline to have three automation phases named benchmark, load test and scaling. It minimizes the system interruption by using test bench approach when system benchmarking and it uses the production traffic for load testing which gives more accurate results. Once benchmark and load test phases are completed, system scaling can be evaluated. Initially, the pipeline was developed using Jenkins CI server, Git repository and Nexus repository with Ansible automation. Then GoReplay is used for traffic duplication from production to test bench environment. Nagios monitoring is used to analyze the system behavior in each phase and the result of test bench has proven that scaling is capable to handle the same load while changing the application software, but it doesn’t optimize response time of application at significant level and it helps to reduce the risk of application deployment by integrating this three phase approach as CICD automation extended feature. Thereby the research provides effective way to manage Agile based CICD projects.