Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
or managing all of the project's binary dependencies. In other cases,
you may have previously used your IDE for “integration” and deploy-
ment. Either way, the road map to full CI adoption could be quite a bit
longer.
In order for CI to work effectively on a project, developers must
change their typical day-to-day software development habits. Developers
must commit code more frequently, make it a priority to fix broken builds,
write automated builds with tests that pass 100% of the time, and not
get or commit broken code from/to the version control repository.
The practices we recommend take some discipline, yet provide the
benefits stated throughout this chapter. The best situation is one where
most project members agree that there is an exponential payback to the
time and attention they pay to the practices of CI.
There are seven practices that we've found work well for individu-
als and teams running CI on a project.
• Commit code frequently
• Don't commit broken code
• Fix broken builds immediately
• Write automated developer tests
• All tests and inspections must pass
• Run private builds
• Avoid getting broken code
The following sections cover each practice in greater detail.
One of the central tenets of CI is integrating
early and often.
Develop-
ers must commit code frequently in order to realize the benefits of CI.
