Skip to main content

The importance of continuous integration

By Francisco Assis Rosa
Leading a team of developers in the effort of building a robust, quality software product should involve the establishment of some process and tools to assist the team effort and serve as a safety net for the errors of getting people to work together. Continuous integration is, I believe, a crucial element of that process. Introduced by Martin Fowler and Matt Foemmel (see article Continuous Integration), continuous integration establishes the practice of frequent integration of work developed by the several team members verified by automated build and testing of integrated code within a clean sandbox. This practice is valuable for several reasons:
  • It promotes the development of a clear process of building/deployment independent of any specificity of developer's platforms. Code that exists on a single platform only is bound to become dependent on specific aspects of that platform without anyone really noticing the dependencies until trying to port to other platforms. The existence of the integration clean sandbox allows these specific dependencies issues to not go unnoticed.
  • It promotes the development of testing. Being based on the premise of "test often" it makes the testing development part of the team's process. The fact that there is a platform built specifically for build and testing verification transforms, from the developer's perspective, testing efforts into an even more useful and justifiable effort.
  • It allows for quick detection of code integration issues by providing the clean slate for bringing all the code together. The little quirks of code combining can be detected by effective smoke/regression testing.
How hard is it to put in place continuous integration ? It depends a lot on where you are in your development process when you decide to take it up. If your team already makes use of build tools (e.g. Ant, Maven, even Make), makes use of a version control system (e.g. CVS, Subversion) and already does some kind of automated testing (e.g. xUnit) it can become pretty straightforward (You do use these don't you?!?). Continuous integration becomes simply a matter of setting up the integration sandbox and establishing the automation to detect changes in the version control system, building the changed system and testing the changes. You do not even need to go very far to accomplish that. You can find already systems that give you the continuous integration functionality that you need. At Tizra we have chosen to use the Cruise Control open-source, free framework for our continuous integration process (BSD-style license). It does pretty much what we need to do and keeps us on top of any integration issue that might arise from our development effort. It provides us unit tests results gathering, reporting and historical stats gathering for all checks. Continuous integration should be, in my opinion, an important practice for any serious software development company and I, for one, will make every effort to ensure it is put in place in every project I work with.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Yum! Tizra Eats Its Dogfood

By
We keep talking about how Agile PDF makes it easy for nontechnical users to do sophisticated online publishing. Well, tell a story like that long enough and people start to wonder why you're not doing it yourself. Besides, any product benefits when its designers and builders are also users. Software developers call it eating your own dogfood . So a few nontechnical members of the Tizra team dug in (with Joya, pictured above, as menu advisor). We did it just they way any publisher would, applying our company branding with the Agile PDF control panel and basic CSS skills, then uploading PDFs . The only difference is we're not actually publishers, so we used files freely available on the web, and of course, we're giving them away rather than selling them. Voila! The New Agile PDF Demo Site Take a look . Then drop us a note , and we'll show how you can do the same—and a lot more—with your content. All of us, except maybe Joya, found it quite the best dogfood we...
Post a Comment
Read more

Using XML to Create a Better Online Reading Experience for the American Payroll Association

By
Congrats to the American Payroll Association on their recent launch of XML-based publications on Tizra!  Thanks to this collaboration, APA's authoritative books for payroll professionals are now available in crisp, reflowable HTML, creating a user experience that feels like a truly digital native product, rather than a conversion from print. XML-based publishing also creates a better mobile reading experience, supports more precise search and navigation, and opens the door to better accessibility for users with low vision and other disabilities. Our partners at  Scribe  did a great job supporting APA through the process of producing the XML for loading into Tizra, and we’d definitely recommend them to anyone interested in such a transition. It’s hard to overstate what a big step forward this is for Tizra as a platform and a company. XML has long been planned for in the product's architecture, but now for the first time, we have a working example that demonstrates t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Books in Browsers? A Closer Look at e-book Publishing Software Choices

By
What’s an ebook?   For many, the first thought is of a Kindle, Nook or similar device, designed for a single purpose and packed with texts downloaded from a single retailer.  However, it’s easy to forget just how new that notion of ebook publishing software is...or how quickly it’s changing. Vintage Rocket eBook (left) and SoftBook devices show how quickly the basic definition of an ebook can change.  (From the collection of Tizra founder David Durand.) As broadband connections and computing power become more pervasive, the idea of “books in browsers” or “books in the cloud” is gaining traction.  As has already happened in other media with services like Hulu, Netflix and Spotify, book publishers are starting to see the value in streaming content direct to users as they need it, rather than requiring them to download it to their own device before use. The Case for Books in Browsers: Delivering books or content in browsers is ideal for publishers that wan...
Post a Comment
Read more