tagged by: delivery
Continuous Integration
Continuous Integration is a software development practice where members of a team integrate their work frequently, usually each person integrates at least daily - leading to multiple integrations per day. Each integration is verified by an automated build (including test) to detect integration errors as quickly as possible. Many teams find that this approach leads to significantly reduced integration problems and allows a team to develop cohesive software more rapidly. This article is a quick overview of Continuous Integration summarizing the technique and its current usage.
1 May 2006
article
Eradicating Non-Determinism in Tests
An automated regression suite can play a vital role on a software project, valuable both for reducing defects in production and essential for evolutionary design. In talking with development teams I've often heard about the problem of non-deterministic tests - tests that sometimes pass and sometimes fail. Left uncontrolled, non-deterministic tests can completely destroy the value of an automated regression suite. In this article I outline how to deal with non-deterministic tests. Initially quarantine helps to reduce their damage to other tests, but you still have to fix them soon. Therefore I discuss treatments for the common causes for non-determinism: lack of isolation, asynchronous behavior, remote services, time, and resource leaks.
14 April 2011
article
Using the Rake Build Language
Rake is a build language, similar in purpose to make and ant. Like make and ant it's a Domain Specific Language, unlike those two it's an internal DSL programmed in the Ruby language. In this article I introduce rake and describe some interesting things that came out of my use of rake to build this web site: dependency models, synthesized tasks, custom build routines and debugging the build script.
10 August 2005
article
AgileHandover
One of the most common questions I see about agile projects is how they deal with handover to another team. If you have a development team that leaves and hands over support to a support team, how do they cope when agile projects tend to produce much less documentation than plan-driven processes?
28 May 2004
bliki
Buildix
I've talked many times about the virtues of Continuous Integration. To get such an environment working you need a continuous integration server, and a source code control system. To make a project run smoothly you could also do with an issue tracker for bug tracking and the like, and a wiki to help capture all sorts of project knowledge.
7 July 2006
bliki
DatabaseAndBuildTime
Here's an interesting contrast I recently picked up. Two enterprise application projects of a similar size (~100 KLOC), similar environments (Java and .NET). One can do a full build and test in an hour, the other takes 2-3 minutes.
15 January 2004
bliki
IncrementalMigration
Like any profession, software development has it's share of oft-forgotten activities that are usually ignored but have a habit of biting back at just the wrong moment. One of these is data migration.
7 July 2008
bliki
VeryLowDefectProject
When people talk about Extreme Programming, they often focus on such things as its adaptive planning style, or its evolutionary approach design. One small but growing trend that particularly interests me is the small but growing number of XP projects that have very low defect rates, by which I mean less than one production bug per month.
24 January 2004
bliki
InfoQ Interview with Jez and me on Continuous Delivery
Martin Fowler and Jez Humble
An interview with Jez Humble and me at QCon San Francisco in 2010
November 2010
video
Mike Mason and I talk about Feature Branching
In this video (12 minutes) Mike Mason and I talk about the perils of Feature Branching and its alternatives.
5 July 2011
video
Continuous Delivery
Martin Fowler and Jez Humble
We give a one-hour overview of Continuous Delivery. Topics include the justification of Continuous Delivery, the deployment pipeline, continuous integration, devops, and deployment strategies. The highlight is Jez's personification of a release candidate as a hero in a greek myth.
2 December 2011
video
BlueGreenDeployment
One of the goals that my colleagues and I urge on our clients is that of a completely automated deployment process. Automating your deployment helps reduce the frictions and delays that crop up in between getting the software "done" and getting it to realize its value. Dave Farley and Jez Humble are finishing up a book on this topic - Continuous Delivery. It builds upon many of the ideas that are commonly associated with Continuous Integration, driving more towards this ability to rapidly put software into production and get it doing something. Their section on blue-green deployment caught my eye as one of those techniques that's underused, so I thought I'd give a brief overview of it here.
1 March 2010
bliki
CatastrophicFailover
One of the oft advertised features of modern application servers is that they provide failover in a cluster. Clustering improves the reliability of your application, if one of your servers goes down, you have some more up to server your customers. Failover can add even more reliability, if a server goes down in the middle of a interaction the cluster can move that interaction to another server.
However this can be a problem.
7 March 2005
bliki
DiffDebugging
I was working on some example code for one of my writing projects recently when I ran into a failing test. "Ouch", I thought, "those tests were passing last week - what happened?" Rather than trying to find the bug in the code in front of me, I used what I think I'd like to call diff debugging.
1 June 2004
bliki
ReproducibleBuild
One of the prevailing assumptions that fans of Continuous Integration have is that builds should be reproducible. By this we mean that at any point you should be able to take some older version of the system that you are working on and build it from source in exactly the same way as you did then.
30 November 2010
bliki