Often people initially feel they can't do something meaningful in just a few hours, but we've found that mentoring and practice helps them learn. Using daily commits, a team gets frequent tested builds.
This ought to mean that the mainline stays in a healthy state. In practice, however, things still do go wrong. One reason is discipline, people not doing an update and build before they commit. Another is environmental differences between developers' machines. As a result you should ensure that regular builds happen on an integration machine and only if this integration build succeeds should the commit be considered to be done. Since the developer who commits is responsible for this, that developer needs to monitor the mainline build so they can fix it if it breaks.
A corollary of this is that you shouldn't go home until the mainline build has passed with any commits you've added late in the day. There are two main ways I've seen to ensure this: using a manual build or a continuous integration server. The manual build approach is the simplest one to describe.
Essentially it's a similar thing to the local build that a developer does before the commit into the repository. The developer goes to the integration machine, checks out the head of the mainline which now houses his last commit and kicks off the integration build.
He keeps an eye on its progress, and if the build succeeds he's done with his commit. Also see Jim Shore's description. A continuous integration server acts as a monitor to the repository. Every time a commit against the repository finishes the server automatically checks out the sources onto the integration machine, initiates a build, and notifies the committer of the result of the build. The committer isn't done until she gets the notification - usually an email. At Thoughtworks, we're big fans of continuous integration servers - indeed we led the original development of CruiseControl and CruiseControl.
NET , the widely used open-source CI servers. Since then we've also built the commercial Cruise CI server. We use a CI server on nearly every project we do and have been very happy with the results. Not everyone prefers to use a CI server.
Jim Shore gave a well argued description of why he prefers the manual approach. I agree with him that CI is much more than just installing some software. All the practices here need to be in play to do Continuous Integration effectively. But equally many teams who do CI well find a CI server to be a helpful tool.
Many organizations do regular builds on a timed schedule, such as every night. This is not the same thing as a continuous build and isn't enough for continuous integration. The whole point of continuous integration is to find problems as soon as you can. Nightly builds mean that bugs lie undetected for a whole day before anyone discovers them. Once they are in the system that long, it takes a long time to find and remove them.
A key part of doing a continuous build is that if the mainline build fails, it needs to be fixed right away. The whole point of working with CI is that you're always developing on a known stable base. It's not a bad thing for the mainline build to break, although if it's happening all the time it suggests people aren't being careful enough about updating and building locally before a commit.
When the mainline build does break, however, it's important that it gets fixed fast. Continuous Integration is a popular technique in software development. At conferences many developers talk about how they use it, and Continuous Integration tools are common in most development organizations. But we all know that any decent technique needs a certification program — and fortunately one does exist.
Are you ready to be certified for Continuous Integration? And how will you deal with the shocking truth that taking the test will reveal? A phrase I remember Kent Beck using was "nobody has a higher priority task than fixing the build".
This doesn't mean that everyone on the team has to stop what they are doing in order to fix the build, usually it only needs a couple of people to get things working again.
It does mean a conscious prioritization of a build fix as an urgent, high priority task. Often the fastest way to fix the build is to revert the latest commit from the mainline, taking the system back to the last-known good build. Certainly the team should not try to do any debugging on a broken mainline. Unless the cause for the breakage is immediately obvious, just revert the mainline and debug the problem on a development workstation.
To help avoid breaking the mainline at all you might consider using a pending head. When teams are introducing CI, often this is one of the hardest things to sort out. Early on a team can struggle to get into the regular habit of working mainline builds, particularly if they are working on an existing code base. Patience and steady application does seem to regularly do the trick, so don't get discouraged. The whole point of Continuous Integration is to provide rapid feedback.
Nothing sucks the blood of a CI activity more than a build that takes a long time. Here I must admit a certain crotchety old guy amusement at what's considered to be a long build.
Most of my colleagues consider a build that takes an hour to be totally unreasonable. I remember teams dreaming that they could get it so fast - and occasionally we still run into cases where it's very hard to get builds to that speed. For most projects, however, the XP guideline of a ten minute build is perfectly within reason. Most of our modern projects achieve this. It's worth putting in concentrated effort to make it happen, because every minute you reduce off the build time is a minute saved for each developer every time they commit.
Since CI demands frequent commits, this adds up to a lot of time. If you're staring at a one hour build time, then getting to a faster build may seem like a daunting prospect.
It can even be daunting to work on a new project and think about how to keep things fast. For enterprise applications, at least, we've found the usual bottleneck is testing - particularly tests that involve external services such as a database.
Probably the most crucial step is to start working on setting up a deployment pipeline. The idea behind a deployment pipeline also known as build pipeline or staged build is that there are in fact multiple builds done in sequence.
The commit to the mainline triggers the first build - what I call the commit build. The commit build is the build that's needed when someone commits to the mainline. The commit build is the one that has to be done quickly, as a result it will take a number of shortcuts that will reduce the ability to detect bugs.
The trick is to balance the needs of bug finding and speed so that a good commit build is stable enough for other people to work on. The definitive book on Continuous Delivery, which outlines the practices needed to bring code into production rapidly and safely.
The key aspects are collaboration between everyone involved in the release process and automating as many aspects of that process as you can. The book goes through the foundations of configuration management, automated testing, and continuous integration - on which it shows how to build deployment pipelines to take integrated, tested code live. The book details the delivery ecosystem, managing infrastructure, environments and data. Once the commit build is good then other people can work on the code with confidence.
However there are further, slower, tests that you can start to do. Additional machines can run further testing routines on the build that take longer to do. A simple example of this is a two stage deployment pipeline. The first stage would do the compilation and run tests that are more localized unit tests with the database completely stubbed out. Such tests can run very fast, keeping within the ten minute guideline.
However any bugs that involve larger scale interactions, particularly those involving the real database, won't be found. The second stage build runs a different suite of tests that do hit the real database and involve more end-to-end behavior. This suite might take a couple of hours to run. In this scenario people use the first stage as the commit build and use this as their main CI cycle. The second-stage build runs when it can, picking up the executable from the latest good commit build for further testing.
If this secondary build fails, then this may not have the same 'stop everything' quality, but the team does aim to fix such bugs as rapidly as possible, while keeping the commit build running. As in this example, later builds are often pure tests since these days it's usually tests that cause the slowness.
If the secondary build detects a bug, that's a sign that the commit build could do with another test. As much as possible you want to ensure that any later-stage failure leads to new tests in the commit build that would have caught the bug, so the bug stays fixed in the commit build.
This way the commit tests are strengthened whenever something gets past them. There are cases where there's no way to build a fast-running test that exposes the bug, so you may decide to only test for that condition in the secondary build. Most of time, fortunately, you can add suitable tests to the commit build. This example is of a two-stage pipeline, but the basic principle can be extended to any number of later stages. The builds after the commit build can also be done in parallel, so if you have two hours of secondary tests you can improve responsiveness by having two machines that run half the tests each.
By using parallel secondary builds like this you can introduce all sorts of further automated testing, including performance testing, into the regular build process.
The point of testing is to flush out, under controlled conditions, any problem that the system will have in production. A significant part of this is the environment within which the production system will run. If you test in a different environment, every difference results in a risk that what happens under test won't happen in production.
As a result you want to set up your test environment to be as exact a mimic of your production environment as possible. Use the same database software, with the same versions, use the same version of operating system. Put all the appropriate libraries that are in the production environment into the test environment, even if the system doesn't actually use them.
Use the same IP addresses and ports, run it on the same hardware. Well, in reality there are limits. If you're writing desktop software it's not practicable to test in a clone of every possible desktop with all the third party software that different people are running. Similarly some production environments may be prohibitively expensive to duplicate although I've often come across false economies by not duplicating moderately expensive environments.
Despite these limits your goal should still be to duplicate the production environment as much as you can, and to understand the risks you are accepting for every difference between test and production.
If you have a pretty simple setup without many awkward communications, you may be able to run your commit build in a mimicked environment. Often, however, you need to use test doubles because systems respond slowly or intermittently. As a result it's common to have a very artificial environment for the commit tests for speed, and use a production clone for secondary testing. I've noticed a growing interest in using virtualization to make it easy to put together test environments.
Virtualized machines can be saved with all the necessary elements baked into the virtualization. It's then relatively straightforward to install the latest build and run tests. Furthermore this can allow you to run multiple tests on one machine, or simulate multiple machines in a network on a single machine.
As the performance penalty of virtualization decreases, this option makes more and more sense. One of the most difficult parts of software development is making sure that you build the right software. We've found that it's very hard to specify what you want in advance and be correct; people find it much easier to see something that's not quite right and say how it needs to be changed.
Agile development processes explicitly expect and take advantage of this part of human behavior. To help make this work, anyone involved with a software project should be able to get the latest executable and be able to run it: for demonstrations, exploratory testing, or just to see what changed this week. Doing this is pretty straightforward: make sure there's a well known place where people can find the latest executable.
It may be useful to put several executables in such a store. For the very latest you should put the latest executable to pass the commit tests - such an executable should be pretty stable providing the commit suite is reasonably strong.
If you are following a process with well defined iterations, it's usually wise to also put the end of iteration builds there too. Demonstrations, in particular, need software whose features are familiar, so then it's usually worth sacrificing the very latest for something that the demonstrator knows how to operate.
Continuous Integration is all about communication, so you want to ensure that everyone can easily see the state of the system and the changes that have been made to it. One of the most important things to communicate is the state of the mainline build. If you're using Cruise there's a built in web site that will show you if there's a build in progress and what was the state of the last mainline build.
Many teams like to make this even more apparent by hooking up a continuous display to the build system - lights that glow green when the build works, or red if it fails are popular. A particularly common touch is red and green lava lamps - not just do these indicate the state of the build, but also how long it's been in that state. Bubbles on a red lamp indicate the build's been broken for too long. Each team makes its own choices on these build sensors - it's good to be playful with your choice recently I saw someone experimenting with a dancing rabbit.
If you're using a manual CI process, this visibility is still essential. The monitor of the physical build machine can show the status of the mainline build. Often you have a build token to put on the desk of whoever's currently doing the build again something silly like a rubber chicken is a good choice. Often people like to make a simple noise on good builds, like ringing a bell. CI servers' web pages can carry more information than this, of course.
Cruise provides an indication not just of who is building, but what changes they made. Cruise also provides a history of changes, allowing team members to get a good sense of recent activity on the project. In other words, it prevents cooperation ineffectiveness and inability to automate critical processes.
The key challenge of enterprise application integration software is its complexity. This technology started as a series of point-to-point connections and evolved into the centralized model. First, it was connected through an enterprise service bus ESB. But now, many businesses turn to cloud technologies. These days, enterprise integration software commonly works as the network of APIs that together form a cloud-native app.
API, or application programming interface, is the piece of code that facilitates interactions with information. Within this service, all the technical work on creating a point-to-point connection happens.
In particular, API serves as a reusable portal that helps in demanding information, keeping code, and managing information flow.
With multiple APIs, system integration becomes possible. Furthermore, Agile and DevOps methodologies are used to create cloud-native app architecture. With this measure, you can collect several microservers, which are effective separately yet independent combined. Thanks to it, your enterprise integration software will be able to maintain all the processes — including feedback collection, business acceleration, and optimization of core operations.
And Big Data meaning the size and variety of data sources is no longer a challenge for your company. In general, the properly introduced enterprise integration software creates the ready-to-use framework for information interchange. The primary purpose of this technological enhancement is to establish the all-inclusive information realm.
Well-established enterprise application integration of software serves four aims at once:. As the major player in the digital market, Microsoft has caught the trend and recently developed cloud technology for enterprise integration. Offering intelligent cloud services, Informatica is one of the best tools for enterprise integration. It offers both on-prem and cloud deployments, making it possible to create centralized and hybrid governance over your corporate information.
Samepage is the application that has everything needed for successful cooperation. It includes chatting and calling platforms, task management, and real-time collaboration on doc files. If you need a platform that unites all your working chats and apps within one tool, Samepage will help you. OpenText is the tool specially designed for maintaining key operations connected with B2B activities. In particular, the integration software supports B2B transactions on a global scale through various managing services, cloud solutions, and SaaS applications.
Providing the full complex of cutting edge engineering solutions, Intellectsoft can provide the entire software foundation for integrating your business. With our service, you will get a reliable complex of programs that are effectively interconnected with one another. Even though enterprise application software integration promises many advantages to the business, it can bring problems too.
As a precaution, protect yourself from system asynchronization resulting from incompatible data models. Thus, choose only tools that will work the best in your case. Building Integration System further benefits. Building Integration System 4.
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