[Novalug] novalug topic suggestion: "Concepts of Continuous Integration (and a little bit about Hudson)"

[Doug Toppin]

Sorry, I should have included a little more detail on this when I
first sent it out as to what CI is.
>From my perspective, Continuous Integration is what I saw with the
Mozilla Tinderbox work years ago.
It involves having a system in place that will regularly check out
source code from the cm system,
build it and then run automated regression and performance tests on the result.
With Tinderbox, you could observe when the build begain failing and
see the recent cvs check-ins
that were likely the cause (and who did the check-in).  It also
verified that basic functionality still
worked (automated regression testing) and also checked basic paths in
the code such as how
long particular web pages took to render (an increase in time may
indicate an inefficiency
added to the code).  Performance testing also provided useful
historical data such as "how long did
this take a year ago" as opposed to trying to remember.

Some of the benefits to using CI in development work include:
* you could quickly determine when something checked-in caused a build failure
* you could check Tinderbox to ensure the build is still working
before you update (and potentially
  break) your local sandbox, this helps keep a large and
geographically separate development
  team coordinated
* you could quickly get confidence that your mods did not break some
basic eixsting functionality
  that you might not have even known about
* you knew that everything needed to build the code was in the cm
system and being versioned
* builds could be sent to qa much more quickly helping with the
approach of introducing incremental
  changes to test/production more quickly

CI can absolutely increase the pace of development and my feeling now
is that projects that are not using it should have to justify why not
to their leadership.

doug


On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 9:49 AM, Doug Toppin <dougtoppin at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have a novalug topic suggestion: "Concepts of Continuous Integration
> (and a little bit about Hudson)".
> The thought might be what CI is and why it is valuable and then a
> simple Hudson setup and usage.
>
> I don't think that we have had that before, is there interest in this?
> Is anyone proficient and willing to do it?
>
> I will volunteer if not.
>
> Doug
>