CI/CD is Not a Tool

CI/CD is something you do, not something you have.

Having an automated build and deployment pipeline is part of it, but there’s nothing inherently “continuous” about Jenkins or GitHub Actions. I have no problem with tool-focused terms like “CI pipeline” if the intention is to imply that the tool is specifically set up for CI and that we’re actually doing CI. But more often I hear terms like “the CI” or “the CI/CD” used in contexts where there are no indications that CI is actually being done nor that the person is familiar with what CI means in the first place.

I wonder where the confusion came from originally that is so common in our industry. When you hear “continuous integration” when talking about a Jenkins build job that runs on merge, is it the fact that the tool “continues” doing something after the merge that leads to the confusion? Maybe in combination with never looking up the terminology and/or adopting the misleading marketing terminology from the tool vendors? Or even a language barrier with the majority of developers globally being non-native English speakers?

Ironically, I personally think that the terms describe pretty well the essence of what they mean, if you don’t already have a bias towards thinking about the supporting tools. When we do continuous integration, we integrate continuously. This makes me think that the terminology itself is not the problem or inherently misleading. I guess a more likely problem could be people using abbreviations like CI without knowing what they stand for, and then retroactively fitting the full term (like continuous integration) to their assumptions and misconceptions.