A Better Delivery Process for More Reliable Software: How to Speed Development with Continuous Integration

At Shinetech, we’re always on the lookout for better software delivery processes to ensure our clients’ success. At the top of our list, is continuous integration (CI) that has become an essential process in our software development toolkit.

CI makes it easy to ensure software quality, because CI controls the revision process and applies quality checks throughout the development lifecycle—preventing costly reworks and delivery delays.

The principles of CI are simple; find code defects early in the process when they are smaller, easier and faster to resolve.

It works by keeping the chaos of code changes to a minimum, integrating updates and changes continuously and checking for flaws along the way. In this way, the majority of mistakes are eliminated that can lead to poor deployment that costs you time and money.  

The benefits of CI are attractive. Problems like broken/incompatible code and conflicting changes are flagged fast—so they can be fixed before they can become bigger problems that take more manpower and more time. All development teams have access to the current code for testing—resulting in smoother launches with higher success rates.

So how do we use CI to reduce development time? By taking advantage of the built-in automation that includes:

1. Scripting support. Using a script language such as Ruby, we are able to implement automatic building for database migration and upgrades to versions, third-party tools and frameworks. This saves manpower and time, but more importantly is prevents failures that can be caused by artificial errors during the building process.

2. Automated or manual release. CI lets us use release tools and script language to implement automatic or manual release. At the end of each production day, the build is automatically saved to the server. If it fails in the test environment, the deployment will roll-back to last version automatically—saving time and resources on finding and fixing the failures.  It can also produce a manual release as needed to execute scripts.