Jenkins: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 1. Introducing Jenkins

Introduction

Continuous Integration, also know as CI, is a cornerstone of modern software development. In fact it is a real game changer—when Continuous Integration is introduced into an organization, it radically alters the way teams think about the whole development process. It has the potential to enable and trigger a series of incremental process improvements, going from a simple scheduled automated build right through to continuous delivery into production. A good CI infrastructure can streamline the development process right through to deployment, help detect and fix bugs faster, provide a useful project dashboard for both developers and non-developers, and ultimately, help teams deliver more real business value to the end user. Every professional development team, no matter how small, should be practicing CI.

Continuous Integration Fundamentals

Back in the days of waterfall projects and Gantt charts, before the introduction of CI practices, development team time and energy was regularly drained in the period leading up to a release by what was known as the Integration Phase. During this phase, the code changes made by individual developers or small teams were brought together piecemeal and forged into a working product. This was hard work, sometimes involving the integration of months of conflicting changes. It was very hard to anticipate the types of issues that would crop up, and even harder to fix them, as it could involve reworking code that ...