James Lorenzen’s Blog
It’s always kind of nice to return to the basics. I’ve always liked re-reading basic programming practices and patterns. I have a tendency to your investment things I avoid on a regular basis. That’s why I appreciated reading Martin Fowler’s article on Continuous Integration. This article says the last significant revise happened May 2006, but it’s withstood the test of time; similar to the Cathedral and the Bazaar. But if you don’t have the time to read this rather long article, here are a few of the favorites I drawn out as I read it during the period of a couple of days.
Before that, let me explain a small amount of my experience. At my first development job we didn’t genuinely have a VCS (Version Control System) like CVS or SVN nor do we have a CI (Continuous Integration) server; we really didn’t know any better. We essentially do all of our work straight off a shared drive (I know).
But that was before I came to Gestalt, now Accenture, 5 years back. Hudson, and lastly TDD (Test Driven Development). Being exposed to all of the is a huge improvement to my profession. More importantly it’s been a huge benefit to the way i write software and the various tools our groups use such as VCS and CI. I can’t image developing software without them. So true. Because you ran some recent tests locally or manually tested it Just, doesn’t mean your done just because you examined in your changes. You need to monitor CI to ensure it goes by. It has been a topic of conversation on my team lately as we’ve come in each day with a few broken builds.
- Content – £10-£50/hour
- Oh yeah, that’s the linux subsystem on home windows
- Juwel says
- Power source unit (PSU) needs replacement unit
- High degree of Experience using ReactJS / Redux or similar frontend frameworks
- User Defined Fields – Allows categorization of Knowledge Base articles
- 1GHz Qualcomm Quad-Core MSM8909
Solution: check in often throughout the day, but don’t checkin and leave and not verify CI passed. Either stay later, sign in at home, come in early, day or checkin first thing the next. This is an essential point. Not only will this enhance the efficiency of new associates but also reduce the amount of time it takes to produce new CI jobs.
This guideline is even more important for open source tasks. I’ve experienced several issues in the past wanting to patch open up source tasks and wasted a long time just endeavoring to build their code. If you’d like people do contribute to assembling your project, make it easy for these to build your software.
For example, I am wanting to write a straightforward Docky plugin for Hudson, but have ran into several issues (New Plugin and Missing Package) seeking to build the Do project. Have those questions really been Answered? What have I done about any of it? I haven’t retried it since. To restate Mr. Fowler, I should have the ability to easily checkout your code and at the very least build it.
As an extra bonus it’d be nice to perform unit lab tests as well. If your just getting started off with CI this may often be difficult. But your long-term goal ought to be to automate everything. This includes creating/destroying your data source, deploying/undeploying your application, automating your testing, copying configuration files around. I’d even go as far as to say automate the creation of the development environment: setting up maven and java for example.