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

[Jay Hart]

Sounds interesting.

Jay

> 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
>>
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