What should a CI/CD pipeline aim to achieve?

The primary goal of a Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipeline is to automate the software delivery process. The core principle is to minimize manual interaction from code commit to deployment. By automating the build, integration, testing, and deployment stages, CI/CD reduces the risk of human error, increases the speed and frequency of releases, and provides rapid feedback to developers. This high degree of automation is fundamental to achieving the reliability and efficiency promised by DevOps practices.

A. A key objective of CI/CD is to automate testing as much as possible to ensure speed and consistency, not to rely on manual testing.
C. CI/CD enables frequent, on-demand deployments, directly opposing the idea of a rigid, infrequent (e.g., monthly) release schedule.
D. While providing feedback is a critical function of the pipeline, it is a means to an end. The overarching goal is the automation itself, which enables this rapid feedback.

1. Official Vendor Documentation:

Cisco DevNet, "Introduction to CI/CD," Section: "What is CI/CD?". The documentation states, "The main goal of CI/CD is to make the application/service development and release process faster and more robust by using an automated pipeline." This emphasizes automation as the core mechanism.

2. University Courseware:

University of California, Berkeley. CS 169A, "Software Engineering," Lecture 10: "Continuous Integration & Delivery/Deployment." The lecture notes emphasize that a primary goal is to "Automate the build, test, and deployment process" to ensure that every check-in is verified and can be released, thus minimizing manual steps.

3. Peer-reviewed Academic Publication:

Shahin, M., Ali, A., Babar, M. A., & Zhu, L. (2017). "Continuous Integration, Delivery and Deployment: A Systematic Review on Approaches, Tools, Challenges and Research Directions." IEEE Access, 5, 3909-3943. In Section III-A, "Definitions of CI, CD, and DevOps," the authors define the practices based on the principle of automating the software delivery lifecycle to reduce manual effort and enable frequent releases. (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2017.2685629)