You might be tired of hearing that we have kept on yapping about eCommerce for the last year or so, not because we are overhyping it but because the eCommerce business has escalated to a highly alarming rate. Up to today’s statistics, global eCommerce sales have achieved an 8.8% annual increase for the first three quarters of 2024. The biggest sales volume is usually made toward December when the biggest shopping season arrives and hasn’t been considered yet. With that incredibly large market share, modern eCommerce websites have substantially raised the customer expectation bar over time after stumbling over common mistakes and manifesting the true fundamentals of eCommerce testing.

Given the context of achieving the absolute best in an eCommerce website to elaborate its conversion rate at last, the Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) model is the way to go. Although, in software development practices, CI and CD are often the two buzzwords understood interchangeably, these two processes are implemented together in the SDLC, but each represents a different stage in automating the deployment process. While such powerful tools assist the revolutionary development of eCommerce, CI/CD also has its own drawbacks. What are the drawbacks? How can we leverage these drawbacks to efficiently and successfully apply CI/CD in eCommerce?

A Brief Touch Base on CI/CD

CI stands for Continuous Integration, whereas CD stands for Continuous Delivery and Deployment. CI practice is the fundamental foundation of CD, which means that without CI building blocks, the CD automation process would not be completed.

Continuous Integration Continuous Delivery Continuous Deployment
Focus: Merge code changes into a shared repo. Checking all codes are deployable to production. Automate code changes from deployment to production.

Goal: Detecting earth integration bugs, issues, and conflicts. Automating deployment onto the staging or testing environment. Quick and frequent releases.

Process: Automation testing and builds right  after any committing codes. Approval manually before deploying into production. Run approval automatically, once codes pass the automated tests the new version shall be released.

CI/CD benefits in eCommerce

Product quality and reliability improvement

As the table above has referred to, CI helps promptly detect and identify bugs, defects, issues, conflicts, and malfunctions at an early stage of code development or as soon as the code is added to the repository before it is deployed into production at a later stage.

CD automates the deployments, helping minimize manual errors (if any) and maintain consistent quality in all release versions.

Shorter time to market

CI and CD pipelines are generally automating processes that allow the products to be responsive to market change as well as customers’ behavior shifts.

Customer satisfaction and experience enhancement

With new features and innovations introduced, keeping up with the trends helps safeguard customer satisfaction, ultimately increasing product sales and revenues, as well as product loyalty and trust.

Risk mitigation

The majority of CI/CD practices are automated to minimize human errors. This helps facilitate rollback conveniently to previous versions of releases whenever unexpected occurrences occur, contributing massively to lower downtime.

The other sides of CI/CD

The complication goes on.

The implementation of CI/CD needs an effective initial design to integrate the CI/CD pipeline into the projects and automate all the processes that require specialists and experts in the field to carry out such heavy tasks. These intricate integration processes are time-consuming.

The bigger the project, the more complicated and careful the pipeline has to be. Even though there are numerous CI/CD tools on the market that you can easily purchase, not all are customizable and compatible with your current project requirements.

Overhead costs can be overwhelming

Everything can add up quickly. The upfront cost can already be a lump sum, as it would cover the infrastructure setup, tool configurations, and integration costs. Plus, the management fees overtime are an ongoing fee that might be unbearable to SME businesses.

Dependent on heavy infrastructure

The CI/CD pipeline relies on the underlying infrastructure, such as physical and virtual servers, staging and testing environment, tools, and so on. Without these components, CI/CD won’t be able to work properly without getting disrupted.

Security and potential risks

CI/CD is usually automated, but it might accidentally introduce vulnerabilities and unauthorized access, leading to a data breach or malicious code injection into the repo. To avoid these mishaps, tight management and monitoring must be scheduled.

CI/CD also creates a false sense of security, hence creating overreliance and trust in the automation process. Lack of manual testing leads to the possibility of being exposed to unexpected defects and malfunctioning features.

The challenging cultural adaptation

People don’t like changes, especially when it comes to processes. Although the tech industry is known to evolve quickly and constantly adapt to new inventions, shifting the concurrent mindset and its original culture is rather complicated and almost impossible, especially when dealing with a tech organization as a whole. The initiative’s thinking has been ingrained deep into not only the business owners but also employees’ behaviors and habits.

Even if humans set out to change, their habits might become obstacles to overcome and resistance to change at whatever stage triggers failures. Therefore, prior to CI/CD adoption, prepping for culture adaptation should be prioritized to prevent team members from giving in to old habits midway.

Leveraging achievements vs. risks

Automation is undeniably convenient once it is appropriately kick-started, an extreme time-saving approach and a long-term budget saver. However, as we have mentioned above, it unintentionally creates a false sense of dependency, and faulty test results often happen. Manual testing should not be overlooked and carefully incorporated into automation testing cases to further diminish risk potency in eCommerce testing for any software development project. Especially remember always to check off the following conditions while you’re at it:

Slow and steady adoption

Fast and furious does not always promise safety and success. In software development, we target completion in harmony with perfect runs every single time. Although being absolute is ambitious, software testing is striving to gear toward the perfectionist side to prevent hazards, breakdowns, and cyber attacks that affect not only the developers but also the end customers, running the brand reputations that are impossible to win back. Incremental changes and tweaks should be made to introduce CI/CD practices and let the team appreciate the new approach so they can better carry themselves and do them willingly later on in the projects.

Your “best version” of Testing strategy

Planning ahead for a testing strategy that can include both automated testing and manual testing to ensure thorough testing coverage requires serious effort and teamwork. This goes right at the planning stage in the SDLC cycle. Don’t suddenly introduce CI/CD into the cycle before you feel like it would not bring any positive results but rather unwanted chaos, conflicts, and suppression to the team.

Security in check?

Stop assuming and start double-guessing every security practice and procedure implemented. Be alert and do not accept the given circumstances. Rather be safe than sorry to keep the Ci/CD pipelines secured from unauthorized access or malicious attacks.

Constant improvement

Clock in regular review and refinding of your CI/CD processes to explore potential areas for improvement and tackle emerging challenges.

Culture change control

Encourage team members to keep pace with the latest technologies and contemporary practices, fostering a culture of continuous learning to help employees adapt to change.

In short

The CI/CD pipeline is nothing new; it has the potential to revolutionize the software eCommerce industry by shortening the time it takes to market, which eventually helps decrease your R&D costs while leveling up your revenue stream. It also contributes its fair share in boosting product quality, improving teamwork collaborations, and other benefits. Well, it comes with challenges, uncertainties, and underlying associated risks. The same goes with other testing approaches; the decision to implement these testing techniques depends heavily on the nature of the projects, organizations’ strategies, and goals. Need help? Contact our SHIFT ASIA’s support team for further consultations. As a professional Japanese testing solutions provider in the field for over 20+ years, we’re confident we can offer the best industry advice to help you find the optimal fit for your project.