Sam
The Benefits of Continuous Integration
Continuous integration as a standard on all our builds is something that has been in place at Webscope for some time now. We’re all technologists at Webscope and we’re constantly striving to maintain our reputation as the best Drupal web shop in Auckland.
It was something that we’ve been working towards for some time and is the result of carefully researching and choosing the correct bits of technology that have enabled us to put the moving parts together.
We were initially motivated from a developers perspective in that developers really dislike manual testing but love stability, unfortunately they're not mutually exclusive. There’s a saying that goes something along the lines The best developer is a lazy developer meaning that a good developer wants to automate as much of their day to day job as possible, removing repetitive tasks and focusing on the creative areas of their work.
Here are some of the benefits we’ve experienced.
Say goodbye to long and tense integrations
Every time code is pushed on one of our projects the build server pulls down a copy of the live database and files folder from Pantheon and builds a complete Drupal site. Effectively mimicking a ‘live release’ which the full test suite is then run against. This means the live release process will have been tested maybe 100 times before we actually do the live release. Nothing gets released without passing every test.
Increased visibility which enables greater communication
slack.com is now our main team communication tool and supports many integrations with third party services. Our Jenkins server integrates (slack.com/integrations) with Slack, it posts a message when a build starts and when it ultimately passes or fails. Along with the Bitbucket integration which provides links to the files that changed, this enables anybody in the team to easily see the state of the project.
Catch issues fast and nip them in the bud
The whole development process is much more immediate, every CI build is available for the Project Managers to see with the results of the tests output in a human readable format.
Spend less time debugging and more time adding features
This makes our clients happy :) More of their budget is being used to push the project forward.
Proceed in the confidence you’re building on a solid foundation
As soon as a project has been through 3 or 4 sprints there’s usually a significant amount of code deployed. With each business critical function of the site covered by an automated test, the client establishes confidence in the delivered code.
Stop waiting to find out if your code’s going to work
We broke it! Bugs are now usually shallow and have normally been introduced with the last code push. It’s now a quick task to review the logic from the last push and fix the bug.
Improve company culture
This is one of the most important benefits for us. Our team wants to be the best at what we do, CI is a leading best practice that enables us to produce better work that everyone feels proud of. It’s a virtuous circle allowing happy stress free developers to explore their skill sets and grow while at the same time benefiting the business by improving timeline and budget accuracy for our clients. Everybody wins!