The ideal CI & CD process...

...and how it should be.

The application rollout should go trough several instances of testing:

• Delivery team: Developers working on their environments
• Version control: SCM for managing developed code
• triggers build & unit tests
• Build & unit tests: Compiles code and runs e.g. JUnitTests
• triggers automated acceptance tests if successful
• Automated acceptance tests
• triggers user acceptance tests if successful
• User acceptance tests
• triggers release if successful
• Release

Only when passing all instances without issues the application can be delivered to operations.