Implementing Continuous Integration in an Established Organization

Abstract:

Continuous Integration (CI) is a development practice that requires developers to integrate their code changes into a shared repository several times a day using automated tools, so that teams can detect errors quickly, and locate and fix them more easily than back-tracking later on to discover where things went wrong. This talk defines continuous integration in the larger context of continuous delivery; however, most of this talk is about Silverpop’s adoption of continuous integration principles and practices. In just a few years Silverpop has transitioned from no continuous integration to almost textbook continuous integration. We faced many challenges and over time grew and improved its processes of developing, building, testing and deploying code from development to test to production environments. We learned many lessons along the way, including the importance of meaningful notifications, building once for multiple environments, delivering database changes with the code and more. We successfully combined the efforts of several teams, defined the tool chain and built solutions to implement continuous integration. We utilize many tools as part of continuous integration including Subversion for source control, Jenkins for CI builds, Fitnesse for testing, ControlTier/RunDeck for automated deployment and Chef for automated configuration.

Slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/13iC1Y55O0CDuK6IML65ydYj1AfYO6LL2jdyQyCBK-oo/pub?start=false&loop=false&delayms=3000

Speaker:

Dean Aldinger