Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
haven't changed, and you'll spend precious development hours need-
lessly hunting down problems that don't exist. When we make
assumptions in software development, we waste time and increase
risks.
Reducing Assumptions
Continuous Integration can help reduce assumptions on a
project by rebuilding software
whenever a change occurs
in a
version control system.
We may think that the latest, greatest technology will be the “silver
bullet” to solve all of our problems, but it will not. At one company,
one of my initial responsibilities was to incorporate good software
development practices into the company—by example. Over time, we
were able to implement many widely accepted practices for develop-
ing good software into the projects. Having worked on many different
projects that used different methodologies, I have found that, in gen-
eral, iterative projects—using the Rational Unified Process (RUP) and
eXtreme Programming (XP), in my case—work best, because risks are
mitigated all along the way. Developing software requires planning for
change, continuously observing the results, and incrementally course-
correcting based on the results. This is how CI operates. CI is the
embodiment of tactics that gives us, as software developers, the ability
to make changes in our code, knowing that if we break software, we'll
receive
immediate feedback.
This immediate feedback gives us time to
course-correct and adjust to change more rapidly.
CI is about the fundamentals. It may not be the most glamorous
activity in software development, but integrating software is vitally
important in today's complex projects. Seldom do the
users
of the soft-
ware say to me, “Wow, I really like the way you integrated the soft-
ware in the last release.” And since that doesn't happen, it may seem
like it isn't worthwhile to make these efforts behind the scenes. How-
ever, anyone who has developed software using a practice such as CI is
empowered by a consistent and repeatable build process kicked off
when a change occurs to the version control repository.
