Continuous Integration: Improving Software Quality and Reducing Risk

by Paul M. Duvall, Steve Matyas, Andrew Glover

Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
ISBN: 0321336380

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Book Description

For any software developer who has spent days in “integration hell,” cobbling together myriad software components, Continuous Integration: Improving Software Quality and Reducing Risk illustrates how to transform integration from a necessary evil into an everyday part of the development process. The key, as the authors show, is to integrate regularly and often using continuous integration (CI) practices and techniques.

The authors first examine the concept of CI and its practices from the ground up and then move on to explore other effective processes performed by CI systems, such as database integration, testing, inspection, deployment, and feedback. Through more than forty CI-related practices using application examples in different languages, readers learn that CI leads to more rapid software development, produces deployable software at every step in the development lifecycle, and reduces the time between defect introduction and detection, saving time and lowering costs. With successful implementation of CI, developers reduce risks and repetitive manual processes, and teams receive better project visibility.

The book covers:

• How to make integration a “non-event” on your software development projects
• How to reduce the amount of repetitive processes you perform when building your software
• Practices and techniques for using CI effectively with your teams
• Reducing the risks of late defect discovery, low-quality software, lack of visibility, and lack of deployable software
• Assessments of different CI servers and related tools on the market

The book’s companion Web site, www.integratebutton.com, provides updates and code examples.

About the Author

Paul Duvall is the CEO of Stelligent, a firm that helps clients create production-ready software every day. A featured speaker at many leading software conferences, he has worked in virtually every role on software projects: developer, project manager, architect, and tester. He is the principal author of Continuous Integration: Improving Software Quality and Reducing Risk (Addison-Wesley, 2007), a 2008 Jolt Award Winner. Paul contributed to the UML 2 Toolkit (Wiley, 2003), writes a series for IBM developerWorks called Automation for the people, and contributed a chapter to No Fluff Just Stuff Anthology: The 2007 Edition (Pragmatic Programmers, 2007). He is passionate about automating software development and release processes and actively blogs on IntegrateButton.com and TestEarly.com.

Stephen M. Matyas III is vice president of AutomateIT, a service branch of 5AM Solutions. He has a varied background in applied software engineering, with much of his professional, hands-on experience being in the areas of enterprise Java and custom software development and services.

Andrew Glover, president of Stelligent Incorporated, is a frequent speaker at conferences throughout North America, as well as author and coauthor of many books and online articles.

Customer Reviews

Software development is (normally) about automating tasks for other people, allowing clients to be more productive at what they do and allowing them to be more reliable in what they do. Automation reduces risk by reducing scope for manual error, particularly for repetitive and mundane tasks. What software developers have often not been so good at is automating the repetitive tasks that they do themselves to improve their own performance and reliability. Whether this is their own decision or because management don't allocate time or resources to do this automation varies from site to site. The evidence is clear though, even from my own experience, that sites where automation is used properly are far more productive, produce more reliable systems and are more fun places to work. I've worked places where this has been done well, I've also worked places where automation has never even been considered. In those latter cases I've done my best to introduce it, usually in incremental steps, with projects becoming far more efficient and reliable as a result. Just this week, whilst automating the building of existing systems for a client, I identified five projects developed by the client that couldn't be built from what was in version control - that alone is evidence that automation is required and, for this client, long overdue.

"Continuous Integration - Improving Software Quality and Reducing Risk" describes this automation, covering everything from automated compilation through to automated deployment, covering topics such as automated testing, inspection etc along the way. It has a leaning towards Java environments, but also refers to tools for .Net (although it doesn't make explicit whether this means true "managed".

This book is an excellent overview of why Continuous Integration is important and about more than just compiling frequently. The book helps you to understand why to do CI, what you can do beyond building, and how to do it. In addition to general principles, the book points you to some excellent tools and resources. This book is an excellent companion to Software Configuration Management Patterns: Effective Teamwork, Practical Integration; it provides teriffic information that support the build patterns in that book. You might already know some of the information in this book, but it is worth buying if you need to encourge CI in your organization for the clear discussion of why CI matters and the for the detailed advice on how to implement it.