CI/CD for IBM i (aka AS/400 or AS400)

CI/CD, or Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery/Deployment emphasizes the rapid release of small, incremental changes and the use of automation throughout the development process. CI/CD tooling is central to DevOps and key to its success.

With Continuous Integration, developers merge their code changes back to the main branch as often as possible. As soon as a change is committed, automated build and test processes are run to validate the correctness of the change. Defects are detected as early as possible in the development cycle – at the point where their impact and cost is least: a “shift left” of defects.

Test automation is key to Continuous integration to ensure that new commits do not break the application when integrated into the main branch.

Continuous Delivery is an extension of CI, where software is built, configured and packaged in such a way that it can be released to production automatically at any time.

Continuous Deployment goes even further than Continuous Delivery, automatically orchestrating application deployment all the way to the customer on each and every change.

By accelerating the feedback loop with customers, the gains can be massive – in software quality, project timescales, outcomes and development cost.

Where CI/CD is mainstream on open or distributed platforms, implementing CI/CD on traditional platforms such as IBM i is more difficult and challenging. Legacy development tools, their incompatibility with enterprise tooling and inflexible development methodologies have held back the move to a continuous model.

To simplify the implementation of CI/CD on IBM i, ARCAD Software has integrated its advanced IBM i automation with standard enterprise DevOps tools Git, Jenkins and Jira.

ARCAD for DevOps: One single repository and DevOps pipeline for all your software assets, with advanced support for IBM i:

By transforming the previous linear methods into a parallel and continuous workflow, this new CI/CD model enables faster user feedback, shorter delivery timescales and reduced IT cost.