The Art of Agile Development, 2nd Edition

Continuous Integration

AUDIENCE

Programmers, Operations

We keep our latest code ready to release.

Most software development has a hidden delay between the team saying, “We’re done” and when it’s actually ready to release. Sometimes that delay can stretch on for months. It’s the little things: getting everybody’s code to work together, writing a deploy script, pre-populating the database, and so forth.

Continuous integration is a better approach. Teams using continuous integration keep everyone’s code working together and ready to release. The ultimate goal of continuous integration is to make releasing a business decision, not a technical decision. When on-site customers are ready to release, you push a button and release. No fuss, no muss.

• “Collective Code Ownership”

• “Refactoring”

Continuous integration is also essential for collective code ownership and refactoring. If everybody is making changes to the same code, they need a way to share their work. Continuous integration is the best way to do so.

Continuous Integration Is a Practice, Not a Tool

One of the early adopters of continuous integration was ThoughtWorks, a software development outsourcing firm. They built a tool called “CruiseControl” to automatically run their continuous integration scripts. They called it a continuous integration (CI) server, also known as a CI/CD server or build server.

Since then, the popularity of these tools has exploded. They’re so popular, the tools have taken over from the actual ...