Smart People:1 Heavy Process:0
This blog is dedicated to improving the software creation process by relying on good people, smart practices and best-of breed tools.
-
Agile 101: What is Continuous Integration?
Posted on February 19th, 2007 2 commentsWhat is Continuous Integration (CI)?
Continuous Integration (CI) is the practice of periodically executing Automated Build Scripts (ABS), preferably in short intervals. There are two flavors of this practice. The first flavor, mostly applied by early XP practitioners states that the system is built by one developer at any given time. The teams have adopted various physical tokens signifying the builders’ "right of build". In this flavor of CI Automated Build Scripts are still required, albeit the kicking off the build happens manually. Since this version relies heavily on the entire team to be colocated, it does not scale well in distributed Agile projects.
The second flavor of CI relies on a computer background process to poll the code repository in short intervals and automatically trigger the build process if it detects any changes since the last build. In this version of CI, the developer is only responsible to build locally and check-in the code. This model is better suited for highly scalable Agile teams because of its reliance on automated asynchronous processes to trigger the build. This gives distributed teams an early feedback on the status of the system and therefore it enables dislocated team members and managers to have the same quick feedback as the team itself.
Bookmark at:
StumbleUpon | Digg | Del.icio.us | Dzone | Newsvine | Spurl | Simpy | Furl | Reddit | Yahoo! MyWeb2 responses to “Agile 101: What is Continuous Integration?”
-
Levent Gurses’ Journal » Agile 101: Automated Build Scripts (ABS) defined February 19th, 2007 at 02:27
[…] ABS should be easy to plug-in to a Continuous Integration (CI) sever - this is especially important for distributed and offshore Agile teams as the time zone differences make it necessary to build continuously and notify the teams of any problems early. ABS written in Ant or Maven for instance, allow for automated and unattended execution, making them a perfect choice for CI. […]
-
[…] One of the points in What is Continuous Integration (CI)? was the importance of having reliable automated build scripts and executing them often. CI can be seen as a natural extension of the Automated Builds practice since in most cases it relies on the presence of a set of ABS. A well-designed CI system encapsulates other sub-practices such as Continuous Builds, Continuous Database Integration, Continuous Unit Testing, Continuous Deployment, Continuous Functional Testing, Continuous Notifications, and Continuous Reporting. All of these are designed to shorten the time between the problem discovery and the problem solution. Agile teams can rely not only on the time-saving nature of automated asynchronous builds, but also on the timely and accurate feedback as a result of this type of CI. […]
Leave a reply
