Introducing GitHub Actions

Before we dig deeper into GitHub and its Actions infrastructure, we need to have a better understanding of the CI, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment (CD) concepts (usually abbreviated as CI/CD), and how these agile practices can help in the software delivery process.

What is continuous integration?

The term continuous integration was originally coined by Grady Booch in his book Object-Oriented Analysis and Design with Applications, published in 1991. CI is a software development practice by which several developers commit their work on a single development project to a central repository where automated builds and tests are run to guarantee that these changes won’t break the project. Further refinements of the CI term, especially those proposed by the Extreme Programming (XP) software development methodology, include repeating this operation multiple times a day.

CI tries to solve the problem where other development processes...