Building great applications is not a trivial task. On the contrary, it is a difficult and complex endeavor in which many professionals need to work together efficiently to create applications that correspond to high end user expectations.

Today, everything moves very fast, and time to market is very important for success. This chapter is going to introduce methods, processes, and tools to help you optimize your development processes, thus building high-quality software with short release cycles.

Traditionally, building software involves planning whole projects from beginning to end, writing detailed specifications, developing and testing (often in a rush), while hoping that everything will work as expected (as illustrated by the V-model approach).

Sometimes, this approach works, and sometimes, it does not. When it does not work, developers implement features while only testing manually, with the objective of adding unit tests later. Then, at the end of the project, they have to speed up to assure on-time delivery, and hence often run out of time.

This leads to projects with significant technical, functional, and quality flaws, with a high number of bugs and tremendous maintenance effort, resulting in long release cycles. In the worst-case scenario, end users will not like the delivered features; hence, the final product could be considered to be a complete failure. There is a better way of doing things, and this is something people have been talking about for some time now, and that you have surely already heard of—agile methodologies!

Agile methodologies, when combined with continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD), provide solutions for building better software with a fast time to market, lower maintenance costs, better overall quality, and higher customer satisfaction.

While this book is not about agile methodologies as such, we recommend familiarizing yourself with the subject, and we are going to explain all of the tools and processes related to it.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• CI, CD, and build and release pipelines
• Using Azure DevOps for CI and CD
• Creating a free Azure DevOps subscription and your first Azure DevOps project
• Organizing your work via work items
• Using Git as a version control system (VCS)
• Creating an Azure DevOps build pipeline
• Creating an Azure DevOps release pipeline