Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Developer
Once a developer has performed all of the modifications related to the
assigned task, she runs a private build (which integrates changes from
the rest of the team) and then commits her changes to the version con-
trol repository. This step may occur at any time and does not affect the
subsequent steps of the CI process. An integration build does not occur
unless there are changes applied to the version control repository.
Listing 1-1 demonstrates an example of executing a private build
by calling an Ant build script from the command line. Notice that this
script retrieves the latest updates from the Subversion version control
repository.
Find Problems Earlier by Building Often
Once you've automated your build and it can be run via a single
command, you are ready to perform CI. By running this automated
build whenever a change is committed to your project's version
control system, teams can answer questions like:
•
Do all the software components work together?
•
What is my code complexity?
•
Is the team adhering to the established coding standards?
•
How much code is covered by automated tests?
•
Were all the tests successful after the latest change?
•
Does my application still meet the performance
requirements?
•
Were there any problems with the last deployment?
Knowing that software was successfully “built” with the latest
changes is valuable, but knowing that software was built
correctly
is invaluable, as software defects will undoubtedly creep into a
code base at some point. The reason you want to build
continu-
ously
is to get rapid feedback so that you can find and fix problems
throughout the development lifecycle.
