a little madness

It’s been a little while, but my theme hasn’t finished yet. In this case I am revisiting an idea I posted about some time ago. Due to the clear benefits of continuous integration for large teams, sometimes people forget the ways in which it can be useful for small teams. Even teams as small as one.

For small teams, the benefits are less about communication (although that is still an important factor as soon as you have more than one developer), and more about automation. Calling out the points made in my last post, these benefits include:

• Build and release automation: nobody should waste time on manual build and release processes, least of all teams already short on development resources. Setting up a continuous integration process enforces a fully automated build, which naturally extends to automated releases.
• Building across multiple environments: as a small team with a correspondingly small number of development environments, it’s unlikely your code is naturally exercised on all the platforms your support. A continuous integration server that supports distributed builds can make it easy for you to test across platforms.
• Testing frequency: a small team of developers will naturally have a lower overall frequency of testing than a large team, simply because there are less people exercising the code as they work. A continuous build can help close the gap, helping to uncover Heisenbugs that might otherwise escape into the wild.

Perhaps the largest benefit is a shift to the continuous integration mindset of working — coding in short iterations and checking in at least daily. The solo developer, with nobody else waiting for their changes, can easily bash away at the keyboard for weeks between checkins. Sometimes this works fine, but other times you end up losing perspective and sometimes motivation as you keep digging and digging away. Nothing keeps development on track better than taking baby steps and constant assessment of progress, and the very feeling of progress feeds your motivation.

This is what continuous integration is all about — baby steps, constant feedback.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 6th, 2009 at 8:41 am and is filed under Agile, Build, Continuous Integration, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.