What is Continuous Integration?
Continuous Integration is a software development practice of performing software integration frequently…several times a day, in fact. Ideally, your software application or system should be built automatically after each commit into a shared version control repository. Upon each successful build, the system integrity should be verified using automated tests that cover if not all, then at least most of the functionality. If some tests fail, the developer responsible is notified instantly and the problem can be identified and solved quickly. Using this approach, you can deliver working and reliable code to the customer much faster, while also mitigating the risk of releasing unstable, buggy software to your users.
Why Continuous Integration?
Continuous integration has become a very integral part of any software development process. The continuous Integration process helps to answer the following questions for the software development team.
- Do all the software components work together as they should? – Sometimes systems can become so complex that there are multiple interfaces for each component. In such cases, it’s always critical to ensure that all the software components work seamlessly with each other.
- Is the code too complex for integration purposes? – If the continuous integration process keeps on failing, there could be a possibility that the code is just too complex. And this could be a signal to apply proper design patterns to make the code lesser complex and more maintainable.
- Does the code adhere to the established coding standards? – Most of the test cases will always check that the code is adhering to the proper coding standards. By doing an automated test after the automated build, this is a good point to check if the code meets all the desired coding standards.
- How much code is covered by automated tests? – There is no point in testing code if the test cases don’t cover the required functionality of the code. So it’s always a good practice to ensure that the test cases written should cover all the key scenarios of the application.
- Were all the tests successful after the latest change? – If a test fails, then there is no point in proceeding with the deployment of the code, so this is a good point to check if the code is ready to move to the deployment stage or not.
