Continuous Integration

This “whole reviewing thing” turns out to be more challenging than initially expected, I would like to make more time doing this, but it’s definitely enjoyable and I find it a wonderful way of honing one’s abilites (in my case very limited) to write. So, on with the show.

This time, a book on CI: Continuous Integration - Improving Software Quality and Reducing Risk (Amazon). Even though I had little expectations from this book, after going over a couple of reviews from Goodreads I still decided to go ahead and read it. I think if you’re new to this whole CI thing, this is a great book to start with, even if some of the tools presented are no longer that recent/relevant. It goes over many good practices, and all the practices and recommendations are not only still relevant, but surely there are still many teams and companies out there today, that are still not following them.

Automating builds, failing fast and using a dedicated build machine for quicker builds is common sense today, but considering that this is a 2009 book, it is rather impressive that not everyone is not fully on-board with the ideas presented in here. Funny thing is, some of the tools presented are no longer available at this point, while others have become de-facto standards.

I would recommend this book for everyone who needs to have an introduction to the whole CI (Integration) and CD (Delivery) of software, and get some solid good practices from this industry.

“How reliable do you want your software to be? Source code is only as reliable as the test coverage, and tests are only as valuabe as their execution frequency. By segregating tests into four automatable categories mapping to unit, component, system and functional, a CI system can be configured to execute tests in an efficient manner.”