The CICD approach advocates the following:

• Continuous integration—continuous merging of code across developers, the automation of unit tests, code packaging, and integration with other systems of the product/organization
• Continuous testing of this integrated product across development milestones (not just at the end)
• Automated build promotion to higher-level environments based on predefined rules
• Continuous release, where promoted builds are deployed automatically to production environments

The CICD workflow or pipeline defines the various stages and gates for code to reach production from a dev environment, and offers tooling to automate this process. The trigger for the whole process is a webhook installed in the source control system (for example, GitHub). This hook triggers a pipeline, involving a set of processes which take the code, package it, test it, and deploy it, as show in the diagram: