CI/CD stands for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (or Deployment). Together, they describe a set of practices and tooling that automate the process of validating and releasing software changes. Rather than accumulating code changes over days or weeks and releasing them all at once, a CI/CD pipeline processes each change as it is committed, running tests and checks automatically before promoting code toward production.
Continuous Integration is the practice of merging code changes frequently and running automated tests on every merge to catch problems early. When a developer pushes code, the CI system builds the application, runs the test suite, checks code quality, and reports back within minutes. Problems caught at this stage are cheap to fix. Problems caught weeks later, after many changes have accumulated, are expensive to debug and risky to fix under time pressure.
Continuous Delivery extends this by automating the release process so that every change that passes the CI checks is in a deployable state. Continuous Deployment goes one step further and automatically deploys passing changes to production without human intervention. Most organizations practice Continuous Delivery, with a human approval step before production deployment, rather than fully automated Continuous Deployment.
For engineering teams, CI/CD is one of the highest-leverage investments available. Teams with mature CI/CD pipelines deploy more frequently, have lower change failure rates, recover from incidents faster, and spend less time on release logistics. These correlations are well-documented in the DORA research program. For non-technical founders evaluating an engineering team's maturity, the presence or absence of a CI/CD pipeline is a meaningful signal.