CONTINUOUS INTEGRATION FOR SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS

Continuous Integration is the practice of integrating new or updated code with the existing version in the

software development projects. The crux is to determine the frequency of this integration to ensure that no

version mismatches occur and the code is always the correct and the final one. The main aim of continuous

integration hence, is to reduce the time taken in maintaining the integrity of a custom software

development project. The projects successful in achieving this, exhibit speed in software delivery and are

categorized as continuous integration software.

Best practices to achieve continuous integration are very subjective and new methods and tricks of the trade

keep replacing the older ones. Concentrated efforts go on in this direction by streamlining practices for

automation. Build automation is one such practice.

Maintaining a code repository with a suitable check in check out procedure is the basic method to achieve

continuous integration. At a given time only one version of the software is checked out for changes and

updates. This practice reduces occurrences of multiple versions and automates the build with a single

command to compile and generate documents & web pages. This system gives the latest production

environment without ambiguity. The build can also be made self testing for confirming that it is in accordance to

the expected results. Daily or end of the day checking in of code ensures that a piece of software does not

remain away from the periodic build cycle and that the system becomes ‘current’ at the end of the day. Each

periodic working version should be built to ensure correct integration.

This is achieved by automated continuous integration. In this way the issues related to integration can be

resolved every day and there are very few possibilities of ambiguous situations. A faster option is to test in a

downscale of the production environment rather than the production department itself. Continuous deployment

can be used in conjunction with continuous integration to prevent defects and gaps. One of the biggest

advantages of CI is that it makes it easy to get the latest deliverable and the version.

CI thus emerges into an ongoing quality control process during the management of the development of

software code ensuring the quality of software projects. Automation for build management, release

management, deployment automation and test orchestration assures that the workflows adhere to quality

standards and that the procedures are always followed.

This continuous monitoring of the software and regular integration and deployment to the production

environment improves the quality of software highly, ultimately minimizing the delivery time by applying quality

control during development rather than after development when the volume to check and test is really big.

Truly, CI emerges as the much-needed practice waiting to be implemented.