Re: Continuous Integration Is A Hack
Ben Rady’s recent blog post Continuous Integration Is A Hack always had a title that would attract the attention of someone working on this said “hack”. One core part of Ben’s argument is that:
Agility is a set of values and principles…and no more. Practices depend on technology and technique, which can (and should) be constantly evolving. Values, on the other hand, address the fundamental issues raised when humans work together to create something, and that is truly what makes Agility worthwhile.
This I completely agree with, and it also makes me sceptical of many “certifications”. However, Ben’s attack on CI (while making for a good headline) is off the mark in many ways. Let’s take a look at what he actually says:
CI is one of many useful practices that Agile developers employ today, but fundamentally, it is a hack. That’s because although it’s very useful to know that I’ve introduced a bug 20 minutes after creating it, what I really want is to know the very second that I type the offending line in my editor. CI is just the best that we can do right now, given the technology that is at our disposal.
This shows Ben’s leaning towards Continuous Testing. However, the criticism is wrong in several ways:
- CI is not just (or even primarily) about automated testing, it is about integration. Running tests as you edit your code does not take integration with your team members into account!
- Running tests continuously on your local machine doesn’t help detect cross-platform or machine-specific issues – you need builds running in an independent environment.
- Some tests will never run fast enough to be run continuously, but they still need to be run as frequently as possible.
I could go on, but there is a more fundamental problem here: Ben is boxing the definition of CI into the technical boundaries that he sees today. CI is a practice, not an implementation. I find it ironic that Ben is railing against the definition of Agile as a static set of practices, but then defines CI by today’s implementations! As time passes tools will improve and will take CI to new levels. A key area of improvement has always been reducing feedback time: so rather than being at odds with CI, continuous testing is one part of the larger practice!
