Continuous Integration Clinic
Agile 2008 – TorontoMaciej Zawadzki
Maciej Zawadzki
• Co-founder and President of Urbancode, Inc.
• Worked on three generations of Anthill/AnthillPro.
• Speaker at SD East, SD West, and the No Fluff Just
Stuff Conference series.
• Co-author of Professional Struts Applications
Agenda
• CI Then and Now
• Why the change?
• Common implementations
• Where are we headed?
• Lab
Original CI
• What is Continuous Integration:
– Development practice under which developers commit code
often, and
– Each commit should not degrade code quality
• Lets Analyze This in terms of:
– Audience
– Traceability
– Artifacts
CI Today
• Build code and give rapid feedback to development
• Deploy product into test environment
• Execute multiple suites of tests
• Release final product to production
• Traceability through every stage
Build Deploy ReleaseTest
Build Automation Silo
Test Automation Silo
• Testing commonly requires the following steps:
– Prepare test environment (e.g. provision VMs, application servers)
– Deploy build artifacts and test clients
– Run tests
– Capture results
– Tear-down
• Test Orchestration automates those steps to save time and prevent mistakes
Concurrent Test Workflow
Run Test Clients
StartProcess
Prepare
GatherResults
DeployTest Clients
DeployArtifacts
Deployment Automation Silo
• Multiple Deployment Environments – It is not enough to have an automated deployment system that deploys to a single environment. There are complications with supporting multiple environments:
• Environment specific configuration
• Environment specific deployment topology
Agenda
• CI Then and Now
• Why the change?
• Common implementations
• Where are we headed?
• Lab
Slippery Slope of Quality Determination
• CI presents two goals:– Quality determination
– Fast feedback
• Karl Popper:– No amount of positive outcomes of testing can confirm a
scientific theory; but a single failed test can disprove the theory
• Therefore it is not sufficient to run your unit tests but not your system, performance, load, etc. tests.
CI moving from “invention” to “innovation”
• Invention– proven to work in the laboratory
• Innovation– it can be replicated reliably on a meaningful scale at
practical costs.
• For an idea to move from invention to innovation requires an ensemble of critical components.
Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline
Example of invention vs innovation
• Invention: Wright brothers invented flight
• Innovation: DC-3 launched commercial air travel– Variable-pitch propeller– Retractable landing gear– Monocoque construction– Radial air-cooled engine– Wing flaps– (One year earlier, Boeing 247 was missing the flaps)
Is CI the Innovation for Automation?
• CI Brings together the following “critical” factors– Automation
– Self-service
– Transparency
Agenda
• CI Then and Now
• Why the change?
• Common implementations
• Where are we headed?
• Lab
Builds Centric – Staged Builds
• Everything is a build
• Different “types” of builds
execute on different schedules
– CI build every 15 mins
– Longer Test build every 4 hrs
– Regression test build every night
– Etc.
Process Centric
• Build types are decomposed
into processes
• Processes are executed
sequentially
• Traceability between
processes is problematic
Lifecycle Centric
• First class representation
of “flow” through lifecycle
stages
• Traceability built-in
• Efficient decomposition of
build types into non-
overlapping processes
Agenda
• CI Then and Now
• Why is this happening?
• Common implementations
• Where are we headed?
• Lab
Release Management
• Forrester Research defines Release Management as the definition, support, and enforcement of processes for preparing software for deployment to production.
Integration for Release Management
The Convergence of Agile and Governance
Agenda
• CI Then and Now
• Why is this happening?
• Common implementations
• Where are we headed?
• Lab
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