Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Documentation and Feedback
Many developers work under the firm belief that documentation
belongs in the source code, in fact, that clear, concise code with well-
chosen class, variable, and method names (for instance) is the best
documentation. A CI system can provide the benefits of documenta-
tion without some of the hassles. You can use tools such as Maven,
Javadoc, or NDoc to generate documentation. Moreover, there are
tools that can generate class diagrams and other information, all based
on the committed source code in your version control repository.
You'll find significant benefits in obtaining near-real-time documenta-
tion of source code and project status using your CI system. You may
choose to generate your document artifacts periodically rather than
continuously.
A critical feature to good CI systems is speed . The essence of a CI
system is to provide timely feedback to developers and project stake-
holders. It's easy to load so much into a CI system—for the sake of
completeness—that it takes an unreasonable amount of time to finish a
cycle. As such, a balance must be struck between the breadth and
depth of a CI process against the need to provide rapid results. This is
especially important when using continuous testing. We discuss tech-
niques for creating fast builds in Chapters 4 and 6.
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Summary
This chapter has given you a simple overview of the features of Con-
tinuous Integration. It also has shown how you can incorporate addi-
tional processes into your CI system, such as comprehensive
database integration, testing, inspection, deployment, and feedback.
The rest of this topic explores the details of each of these processes
associated with developing software using CI.
Questions
How do you know you are doing CI correctly? These questions can
help you decide what's missing on your projects.
 
 
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