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