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- March 8, 2017
- Bits and Pieces
Perhaps the most important yet easiest to implement of all the software development practices in Agile is continuous integration. Continuous integration is simply creating an infrastructure where the code that is being built can be integrated into the project immediately.
One of the biggest challenges when writing software is the dependency relationship between the code that’s been built and the rest of the code in the system. These dependencies are not always obvious and only show up when we begin to integrate code from various developers into the entire project.
In traditional Waterfall development, software is integrated as one of the final steps of the process. But doing so obscures many of the potential bugs and often ends up in “integration hell” that delays projects and compromises code quality.
This can all be avoided through continuous integration. Bugs are found while they’re still fresh in the mind of the developers who wrote them so that they’re easier to fix and they don’t get compounded by other bugs through the development process. The sooner we can identify and fix bugs the cheaper it is to do so.
A feature is not considered done until it runs and passes all tests on the build server. Just getting a feature to run on the machine of the developer who wrote it can hide a lot of problems that otherwise wouldn’t be uncovered until integration.
But something magical happens when developers use continuous integration. It changes the way we approach problems. We can immediately see if our standards aren’t strong enough or if our approach isn’t right for the problem by integrating our code with the rest of the system as it’s being built. It teaches us in the only way we really learn, with immediate feedback. As a result, the team just naturally flows to building high quality software and there are far fewer surprises at the end of the project.
Continuous integration is easy to implement. Most of the tools needed to make it work are free and relatively painless to set up. Despite this, I’m always surprised to find that many development shops do not use continuous integration, even the ones that call themselves “Agile.”
Continuous integration also creates the technical infrastructure for other Agile practices such as running a suite of unit tests and incrementally building features. I don’t think it’s possible to have an Agile project without continuous integration and if you do no other technical practices I highly recommend continuous integration as the first and foremost Agile technical practice. You will significantly reduce the risk of your project failing and be able to measure progress much more accurately when features are fully integrated into the system as they’re built.
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