4 Key Areas of Continuous Integration
To drive the agility and operational efficiency you need to stay competitive, you must transform your business into a digital business. This shift places even more pressure on application teams to deliver scalable, flexible, and dependable solutions faster than ever before. Critical to your success is being able to easily connect and integrate digital assets inside and outside the company as needed to compete and deliver a superior customer experience.
Faster, More Dependable Integration
Developers are being asked to deliver new projects faster than ever before. Many organizations are adopting a Continuous Integration process that has developers merging their working copies of code more frequently (sometimes as often as several times a day). The goal is to avoid the long drawn-out process of integration with the various portions of a development project after much longer periods of siloed development. With more frequent builds, there is significantly less backtracking to discover incompatibilities or where things went wrong, so you can spend more time focused of building features.
With the focus on more frequent builds, it is more important than ever to make sure the tools your developers are using are efficient and user-friendly in order to support this new model. Key areas to address are the following:
- Automate the build: The integration tools you use should seamlessly work with third-party build automation tools, such as Apache Maven, that will allow you to define how the software is built, and describes its dependencies. This shields the developers from having to know the details and provides for consistency between developers.
- Make the build self-testing: You need a way for developers to easily integrate their changes into the project by automating the integration testing. Leveraging tools like Jenkins or Hudson for builds/testing can be triggered by checking your code into a version control system or scheduled via a cron-like mechanism.
- Central visibility: You need a way for managers, developers, and architects to get information on progress of the project and code quality throughout the development lifecycle.
- Automate deployment: Once the software passes the automated build and testing processes in place, you will want to be able to automate the deployment of the new project by the running of custom scripts, allowing the new application to be deployed to a live test server.
TIBCO ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks is an open and easy-to-use integration platform that allows you to integrate data, people, processes, and systems. The platform includes tools specifically designed to enable Continuous Integration, allowing you to deliver projects faster. To learn more about BusinessWorks or to try it for yourself, click here.
For more insights into Continuous Integration, check back with us next week!