Product Description

For any software developer who has spent days in “integration hell,” cobbling together myriad software components, Continuous Integration: Improving Software Quality and Reducing Risk illustrates how to transform integration from a necessary evil into an everyday part of the development process. The key, as the authors show, is to integrate regularly and often using continuous integration (CI) practices and techniques.

The authors first examine the concept of CI and its practices from the ground up and then move on to explore other effective processes performed by CI systems, such as database integration, testing, inspection, deployment, and feedback. Through more than forty CI-related practices using application examples in different languages, readers learn that CI leads to more rapid software development, produces deployable software at every step in the development lifecycle, and reduces the time between defect introduction and detection, saving time and lowering costs. With successful implementation of CI, developers reduce risks and repetitive manual processes, and teams receive better project visibility.

The book covers

• How to make integration a “non-event” on your software development projects
• How to reduce the amount of repetitive processes you perform when building your software
• Practices and techniques for using CI effectively with your teams
• Reducing the risks of late defect discovery, low-quality software, lack of visibility, and lack of deployable software
• Assessments of different CI servers and related tools on the market

The book’s companion Web site, www.integratebutton.com, provides updates and code examples.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #82250 in Books
• Published on: 2007-07-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

From the Back Cover

For any software developer who has spent days in “integration hell,” cobbling together myriad software components, Continuous Integration: Improving Software Quality and Reducing Risk illustrates how to transform integration from a necessary evil into an everyday part of the development process. The key, as the authors show, is to integrate regularly and often using continuous integration (CI) practices and techniques.

The authors first examine the concept of CI and its practices from the ground up and then move on to explore other effective processes performed by CI systems, such as database integration, testing, inspection, deployment, and feedback. Through more than forty CI-related practices using application examples in different languages, readers learn that CI leads to more rapid software development, produces deployable software at every step in the development lifecycle, and reduces the time between defect introduction and detection, saving time and lowering costs. With successful implementation of CI, developers reduce risks and repetitive manual processes, and teams receive better project visibility.

The book covers

• How to make integration a “non-event” on your software development projects
• How to reduce the amount of repetitive processes you perform when building your software
• Practices and techniques for using CI effectively with your teams
• Reducing the risks of late defect discovery, low-quality software, lack of visibility, and lack of deployable software
• Assessments of different CI servers and related tools on the market

The book’s companion Web site, www.integratebutton.com, provides updates and code examples.

About the Author

Paul Duvall is the CEO of Stelligent, a firm that helps clients create production-ready software every day. A featured speaker at many leading software conferences, he has worked in virtually every role on software projects: developer, project manager, architect, and tester. He is the principal author of Continuous Integration: Improving Software Quality and Reducing Risk (Addison-Wesley, 2007), a 2008 Jolt Award Winner. Paul contributed to the UML 2 Toolkit (Wiley, 2003), writes a series for IBM developerWorks called Automation for the people, and contributed a chapter to No Fluff Just Stuff Anthology: The 2007 Edition (Pragmatic Programmers, 2007). He is passionate about automating software development and release processes and actively blogs on IntegrateButton.com and TestEarly.com.

Stephen M. Matyas III is vice president of AutomateIT, a service branch of 5AM Solutions. He has a varied background in applied software engineering, with much of his professional, hands-on experience being in the areas of enterprise Java and custom software development and services.

Andrew Glover, president of Stelligent Incorporated, is a frequent speaker at conferences throughout North America, as well as author and coauthor of many books and online articles.

Customer Reviews

Covers all the major deployment and automation issues
Continuous Integration refers to the practice of automating the build, testing and deployment of your software, so that producing a finished executable (and the related artifacts) can be done at the touch of a button, and is ideally carried out several times a day.

If this seems like a nice to have feature of your own development, but less of a core practice when compared to version control and comprehensive tests (both of which are requirements for doing CI), this book does a pretty good job of advocating CI as being just as important.

First, the book introduces the core practices of CI (regular builds, tests, and deployment), then goes on to demonstrate how it facilitates other, more advanced practices, which gain value when automated, such as enforcing code style, and recording code metrics.

It does not assume any particular platform, although most of the code uses Java and C# (and associated XML configuration). As a result, it will appeal most to those who want general guidance about why CI is a good idea, what to put under CI, how often to integrate, how long to allow the build to take, what to do if builds are too slow, etc. There's clearly no one-size-fits-all answer to this and this not a step-by-step tutorial book, so you'll need to adapt the code samples given in this book for your own ends.

Therefore, if you're completely new to the idea of CI, then maybe you might want to check out Mike Clark's Pragmatic Project Automation first, which covers a lot of the same ground as the first part of this book, but goes into a lot more detail about the mechanics of using Ant and JUnit with Cruise Control.

Apart from being more language agnostic, what takes this book beyond the Pragmatic tome is the second part, which demonstrates the more advanced processes that CI makes possible: including a chapter on how to integrate databases into CI, which touches on some cultural issues (e.g. the DBA being separate from the rest of the coding team) and providing sandboxes for each developer. Additionally, there's material on how to include reporting and analysis, e.g. code duplication, code coverage and static analysis tools such as Java's FindBugs.

It's also a quick and easy read (less than 300 pages), while still having a pretty wide purview. I don't think this is a subject that would benefit from an enormous tome, and you'll still come away with a much clearer idea of your project's automation and scheduling needs, although you might have to do a bit of digging in online documentation of the various tools mentioned in the book to find your exact solution.

The only bad thing I have to say about this book is that there are some very brief developer dialogues sprinkled throughout, used as examples to highlight suboptimal practices. As ever, these are cringe-inducing and artificial.

Out of the core agile practices of unit testing, version control, and project automation, the latter has the least amount of material available to read. Fortunately, this is a readable, persuasive and helpful book for curing the big bang integration blues.