Adopting continuous integration

CI, originated from extreme programming, is a natural extension of development practices for constantly building, integrating, and validating code automatically. Providing feedback to developers on the risk associated with the integration as early as possible helps to fix integration and quality problems with minimal impact on the speed of delivery. CI is the first step in the CD process. The traditional approach of infrequent manual builds and integrations is no longer viable for high-velocity developments and deployments. The manual build-integration-test-correction cycle significantly impacts the continuous flow of work.

A typical CI process flow is depicted in the following diagram:

Figure 8.5 – Continuous integration pipeline

A Developer continuously commits code in a shared Source code repository that triggers the CI pipeline. Adopting pre-commits eliminates faulty code moving to the code repository. Quality assurance...