silver bullet

Continuous Integration is not a silver bullet

by simpsonjulian on March 25, 2009

It’s very easy to implement continuous integration as part of your enterprise agile transformation. Install some software and point it at your enterprise version control system. That box is ticked. But you just failed to implement CI. Why?

CI is a human process. Automated Continuous integration is meant to make it easier to implement that process. If you have developers who check in at the last possible minute, or who make the build green so they can pass all your enterprise quality gates and deploy, you aren’t doing CI. Sorry.

What use is a silver bullet anyway? Not much. Unless you use it to kill your NNPP.

Note: the Build Doctor and it’s contributors do not advocate shooting and/or killing any programmers. Or anyone else, for that matter.

(Image by dbking)


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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }

1 Jeffrey Fredrick March 31, 2009 at 5:21 pm

Absolutely right.

James Shore covered this a while back: Continuous Integration is an Attitude Not a Tool.

2 Julian Simpson March 31, 2009 at 9:44 pm

@jtf: I just ‘fessed up to James. Thanks for pointing that out. Somehow I missed that one.

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