Continuous Integration - Improving Software Quality and Reducing Risk

Paul Duvall, Steve Matyas, and Andrew Glover have written a fine book describing the value and practice of Continuous Integration or CI for short. If you have heard of CI and want to learn more about it, or if you want to help educate others about it, this book is a very good place to start.

Continuous Integration is a software development practice intended to notify the development team as soon as possible when a defect is introduced. Typically when CI is being used there is an automated system which the builds the entire project many times each day from its source code to its complete form, and all its automated tests and other automated quality assurance tools can be brought to bear.

The authors of "Continuous Integration" repeatedly emphasize the role that CI has in reducing risk in software development and constantly provide examples of specific practices that support and benefit from CI, for example frequent commits to a version control system, automated tests,  automated code analysis (test coverage, code complexity, duplication, etc.)

I think this book would be great for a leader that is trying to convince their team or their management of the value of CI, as well as for a team implementing CI for the first time as an aid to deciding what system to choose and what aspects to implement first.

Continuous Integration: Improving Software Quality and Reducing Risk
by Paul Duvall, Steve Matyas, Andrew Glover
Paperback: 336 pages
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional (July 9, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0321336380
ISBN-13: 978-0321336385

See also:

• Codehause.org has a side-by comparison of many Continuous Integration systems.
• Perl QA Continuous Integration wiki page.

Technorati Tags: agile, continuous integration, extreme programming, software development, software testing