A CI/CD pipeline models the two key stages of software delivery: continuous integration and continuous delivery.

In the continuous integration stage, developers continuously validate and merge branches into a target application. In the continuous delivery stage, the target application is packaged and moved through progressive stages in the pipeline. After application changes have moved through testing cycles, including Pega unit, regression, performance, and load testing, application packages are deployed to a production system either manually or, if you want to continuously deploy changes, automatically.