Continuous Integration
Continuous Integration is a software development practice where changes to your software are integrated into the current code base on a regular basis. The value of continuous integration is the ability to bring new features online at the earliest possible moment.
Continuous integration is accomplished by automating many of the processes for releasing software such as Building, Testing, and Deployment. A good deal of effort goes into this automation initially. The net result, however, is that you can release software much more quickly due to the automation. And, once the automation is complete, it takes little effort to maintain.
Rather than taking days or weeks to create test and deploy a release of your software, an automated system can do the same in minutes or hours unattended. This is called a Continuous Build. It can be used regardless of your software development lifecycle.
Continuous Integration breaks your software down into smaller features and releases them as soon as they are complete rather than waiting for a release cycle. You may already use software created with this mindset. For example, Google Chrome no longer has a release version. I can not readily find any version information in Chrome by going to help. I automatically get new features as they are released. This is one of the more extreme examples of continuous integration.
The biggest value to the consumer of your software is that they don’t have to wait 3 months or a year for the release of a valuable feature. As soon as that feature is complete, and works with the existing software, it is brought into the product distribution.
What do you think? Is this a trend we should expect to become more common? Does cloud integration have some impact on Continuous Integration? Do you use software from vendors how follow this practice, and how does it impact your company?
Send your insights to btaylor@sswug.org to share with our readers.
Cheers,
Ben
$$SWYNK$$
Featured Article(s)
Building a Database Systems Bookshelf
Achieving success working with a database system can be a difficult task. In order to prosper you must have an inquisitive mind and an on-going desire to learn. In this day-and-age of frugality and meager training budgets, much of your education will be self-taught. One of the most cost-effective ways to learn something new is still by reading books. Fortunately, there is no shortage of excellent material for database professionals to choose from.
Featured White Paper(s)
Top 10 Tips for Optimizing SQL Server Performance
read more)