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This blog item gives you an inside scoop into the continuous integration environment at JTeam. You’ll learn about the why, what and how of continuous integration. The tools we use are mainly open source.

Why continuous integration?

A number of years a go not many people new the term continuous integration. That has changed a lot. All people at JTeam know what it is about and all projects use an environment that is set up to actually do continuous integration. For those that do not know what continuous integration is and those that need a short recap, we briefly explain what we think continuous integration is. Let’s start with the definition from Martin Fowler:

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

Key to continuous integration is delivering high quality artifacts. It is not the silver bullet, developers still need to create great code, but using a good continuous integration process helps finding bugs. Checking your quality standards a long the way increases the effect. Of course extra actions are still necessary. You can think about actions like: manual code reviews, performance tests, functional tests, etc.

JTeam has been using continuous integration from the start. Recently we implemented the second version of our continuous integration environment. We introduced new tools, the process however stayed the same.

Continue reading Continuous Integration (Again)