Killing the gatekeeper: introducing a continuous integration system
Wed, 2009-03-04 03:17 — Francis Lacoste
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Add to calendarLevel: Practicing
This is the story of how the Launchpad (https://launchpad.net) development team switched to a continuous integration system to increase several flows in their development process:
- flow of changes on trunk;
- flow of changes requiring database schema upgrade;
- flow of deployed changes to end users.
To switch to a buildbot (http://buildbot.net) based system meant violating a very old company taboo: risking a trunk that doesn’t pass its test suite. The risk of a broken trunk was offset by allowing each developer to run the full test suite in the Amazon EC2 cloud.
Process/Mechanics
Learning outcomes
- Enabling developers to do on-demand test runs and commits more than offset the risk of a broken trunk.
- A continuous integration system enables many different testing and deployment practices.
- Nothing beats Kaizen-style experimentation in rebutting philosophical disagreements.
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