Is CI a waste of time, or have you established a continuous integration system in your development environment? Was it easy to set up and integrate the different tools? Was it worthwhile or did it cause more problems than it solved? Is it easier to set up a CI system on a Java platform? Should Microsoft take the initiative and provide more bundled tools around SourceSafe and Visual Studio to make automated builds and CI easier?
Implementing a continuous integration system is a sure-fire way to dramatically increase software quality and reduce the time to ship product. Yet few development shops actually use it. In the .NET world, this is the result of developer resistance and problems with the available toolset.
by Adam Young,
Owain Wragg
April 21, 2004
raditionally, integration testing is something that is done right at the end of a project: Developers check-in their code and a build team is tasked with compiling everything and creating an installation program that can be deployed for acceptance testing. This is where the problems start, with broken builds, missing files, and a laborious manual process delaying release of the project to customers and squeezing the amount of time available for testing. Continuous integration (CI) attempts to resolve these issues by ensuring that the integration and build phase occurs every time source code changes.
CI is one of the practices of Extreme Programming (XP) and, as such, shares XP's emphasis on open communication, short development cycles, and continuous feedback; but even if you're not practicing XP, CI brings many benefits, including:
The program is always integrated and functional, ready to be delivered to the customer—there's no chance of the build cycle delaying the project.
There's no need for a separate build team—CI requires an automated build process, saving countless painful hours of work.
CI provides constant feedback to the development team and highlights any integration issues as soon as they occur; locating and fixing the source of broken builds becomes trivial.
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raditionally, integration testing is something that is done right at the end of a project: Developers check-in their code and a build team is tasked with compiling everything and creating an installation program that can be deployed for acceptance testing. This is where the problems start, with broken builds, missing files, and a laborious manual process delaying release of the project to customers and squeezing the amount of time available for testing. Continuous integration (CI) attempts to resolve these issues by ensuring that the integration and build phase occurs every time source code changes.
