Building code in a CI/CD pipeline

At the risk of oversimplifying some of the mechanics that happen behind the scenes when you run software, we can generally think of interpreted computer languages such as Python or Ruby as executing raw source code, whereas compiled languages such as Java, C, or C# must convert that source code into a runnable form by compiling it, and then execute the compiled version of the program.

This is an important distinction to keep in mind when configuring a pipeline to verify your code because it means that if your project contains any code written in a compiled language (even if it’s only a small portion of your overall project), you probably need to include a build job in your pipeline before any verification jobs take place. We say probably because some of the jobs that typically run during the verification stage of a pipeline (for example, Code Quality) look directly at source code, whereas others interact with code as it runs. So, if your...