Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 1
Build Software
at Every Change
First, master the fundamentals.
—L
ARRY
B
IRD
(A
MERICAN PROFESSIONAL BASKETBALL PLAYER
)
The founder of javaranch.com, Kathy Sierra, said in her blog, “There's
a big difference between saying, 'Eat an apple a day' and actually eat-
ing the apple.”
1
The same goes for following fundamental practices on
a software project. Seldom will you hear people say that “Testing is
ineffective” or “Code reviews are a waste of time” or that frequent
software builds is a bad practice to follow. But these seemingly funda-
mental practices must be tougher to practice than to preach, because
the frequency of these practices on projects is miserably low.
If you would like to run frequent integration builds so that it
becomes a
nonevent
on your project—including compilation, rebuild-
ing your database, executing automated tests and inspections, deploy-
ing software, and receiving feedback—
Continuous Integration (CI)
can help. In this chapter, we show you the common features available
to CI systems that build upon these fundamental software practices.
1. From
http://headrush.typepad.com/.
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