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InfoQ Homepage Continuous Integration Content on InfoQ

  • Rewards to Improve Team Habits?

    Sometimes teams have trouble starting new habits: writing unit tests, fix compiler warnings, not breaking the build. How do we help the team change these habits? Clint Shank designed a game to help people transition.

  • Subversion 1.5 released

    Subversion, a mature open source version control system used by many open source projects, has just released version 1.5. New features include: merge tracking, sparse checkouts, and conflict resolution in the command line client.

  • Agile Version Control for Multi-Team Development

    Many agree that the minimum set of Agile practices includes disciplined version control. In particular, when several development teams work in the same codebase, to ensure there's a clean, releasable version at the end of every iteration, they need a plan. Henrik Kniberg's proven scheme is a useful guide for teams. This detailed paper includes the entire method and even a cheatsheet.

  • Continuous Integration And Version Control for Databases

    After asserting that one must, as a rule, always version their database work, Scott Allen detailed an approach to making the best of versioning databases. Allen presented a comprehensive, practical approach to creating a baseline, using change scripts to manage schematic revisions, controlling programmatic database objects, and handling branching and merging.

  • Does "Done" Mean "Shippable"?

    There has been a lot of discussion on various agile forums and blogs about the difference between 'Done' and 'Shippable'. It might sound like both mean the same, however discussions on the lists and various blogs suggest that these are still widely misunderstood, mis-used terms. Here's a roundup of recommendations about how to handle "Done."

  • Does Continuous Production Lead To Extreme Agility?

    The idea of continuous production has been around for some time, with Cal Henderson revealing in 2005 that Flickr releases code to production about every 30 minutes. InfoQ investigates continuous production and explores the effects it has on the product lifecycle, and in turn the host organisation.

  • 'MSF for Agile' with MS VSTS - Worth a Look?

    At Qcon London, Kevin Jones spoke from his experiences about Building Better Apps using MSF for Agile with Visual Studio Team System (VSTS). Using examples from Agile teams, he walked through the layers and components of Microsoft's tools, emphasising their flexibility. For Agile teams considering / already committed to Microsoft, this video provides an experienced viewpoint & may be worth a look.

  • Continuous Integration and Code Inspection with Hudson and FindBugs

    A recent article published in IBM developerWorks talks about automating Continuous Integration and Code Inspection tasks in a build process using open source tools. It explains how to install and configure Hudson server with Subversion, Ant, and software inspection tools like FindBugs and PMD to create a build process with continuous feedback on test results and defects.

  • ThoughtWorks Releases Mingle 1.1

    Mingle R1.1 is out, just 3 months after after the first release, packed with new functionality driven by user feedback from the launch and beta period. In December R1.2 will be released.

  • SQL Database Publishing in Visual Studio 2008 and Today

    The Database Publishing Wizard is a popular add-in for Visual Studio, which supports deploying a local database to a remote host. The Visual Web Developer team announces that the wizard will be integrated in Visual Studio 2008.

  • Is Pipelined Continous Integration a Good Idea?

    Sometimes, when the team and/or code-base get large, the CI server starts to slow down. The cycle between builds grows and the feedback degrades – a build may take an hour or more to respond with a pass/fail, and by that time several people may have checked in their code into an already broken build. To address this issue, many teams “pipeline” their CI - but is this a good strategy?

  • Team Foundation Server 2008: Out-Of-The-Box Support for Continuous Integration

    Along with Visual Studio 2008 Microsoft will be releasing a new version of TFS (Team Foundation Server). TFS 2008 will provide extended support for Continuous Integration.

  • Review: Continous Performance Management

    Steven Haines from Quest has published an article demonstrating the use of performance analysis tools in the continuous build cycle as best practice and makes some thought provoking points about the cost of not doing so.

  • Book Excerpt: How to Improve your Continuous Testing

    Continuous Integration has become a standard development best practice - but it's not always done well. Tests take up much of an application's build time, and poorly constructed test suites can cause long builds, whereupon teams start to circumvent agreed-upon CI practices just get the time to code. InfoQ presents advice and examples in Chapter 6: Continuous Testing from a new CI book.

  • Article: Implementing Automated Governance for Coding Standards

    Most development organizations of a significant size have some form of coding standards and best practices. Simply documenting these standards and keeping them up to date can be a significant challenge and enforcing them even harder. Our organization has found that enforcing coding standards and best practices in an automated fashion through our build process has been highly effective.

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