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Why your shop needs continuous integration

Automated software builds and testing improve code quality and increase developer productivity

By Paul Krill, InfoWorld, 07/07/11

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"People are finding the value of more agile practices and the value of integrating on regular basis, bringing the changes together," says John Wiegand, a distinguished engineer and chief architect at IBM Rational.

Continuous integration has also become more popular as applications become more complex and as development teams -- people contributing code -- become more distributed, says Jim Jagielski, chairman of the Apache Maven project management committee. A continuous integration system "helps maintain the QA associated with source code," says. These systems can make sure builds are not broken. "The main drivers have been the complexity of the environment itself and the large number of teams that are focusing on an app."

Continuous integration can be started without a lot of training, Julius says: "Continuous integration is one of those practices that is pretty easy to adopt even if not everybody on the team is fully on board."

Open source eases continuous integration
Although there are some commercial tools staking a claim in continuous integration, such as Microsoft's Team Foundation Server and IBM Rational's TeamConcert, the proliferation of open source makes adoption easier for technologies like continuous integration, Julius says. "[Users] can go and download an open source tool for free" and begin to see how the concepts apply, he remarks.

Eclipse's Milinkovich sees open source as helping continuous integration go completely mainstream in the last few years: "Hudson helped make it more generally available for developers who perhaps couldn't afford the commercial tools."

This story, "Why the time is now for continuous integration in app development," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in application development and open source at InfoWorld.com. For the latest developments in business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.

For more enterprise computing news, visit InfoWorld. Story copyright InfoWorld Media Group, Inc.