Continuous Integration #2

Saturday, March 10th, 2007

I continue my story about continuous integration and I'll start with outlining the basic building blocks that makes up an environment in where continuous integration works.

It can be illustrated by the following table/figure:

The following components have been identified:

Operating System

Operates the server computer.

Web Server

Serves as place (for websites) where developers can supervise, control, retrieve and share information throughout the continuous integration process. The "project" wiki helps sharing information between developers.

Build Environment

Is responsible for compiling, linking the project source code and running test scenarios.

Version Control

Is a repository for different versions of all source code.

Continuous Build

Manages different builds of the project by extracting source code from version control system and feeding it to build environment. Each build can be scheduled and managed and the build and test results can easily be reviewed.

Code Analysis

Runs static code analysis of the source code and output the result of the analysis. Good source code produces no warnings or results from code analysis.

Unit Testing

Runs unit tests of the source code and output the success rate of each single unit test.

Code Coverage

Analyzes how much source code is covered by the unit testing. All source code should be hopefully be covered.

Application Testing

Runs larger more comprehensive integration tests of the (build) application. Outputs the success rate.

Performance Testing

Runs performance and stress tests on the (build) application. Output the results based on benchmarks limits.

Bug/Issue Tracking

Manages reported bugs/issues and their current status.

Wiki

Wiki portal where developers freely can share information about the project.

So now that I've identified the basic building blocks the next installment will look at the actual available tools, with emphasis for this to work in primarily in a Windows based C++ development environment.