Six Core Principles of Continuous Integration
Continuous Integration is helping businesses with a hugely competitive business. Continuous Delivery is built based on CI. That means Cd and DevOps success is highly dependent on implementing CI correctly. By following a few basic principles, teams can successfully integrate CI.
Core Principles of CI
CI is a process that the DevOps team follows, but the entire business gets the benefits. Organizations differ from each other, and they have a different vision from CI. If they cannot implement it correctly, they are more likely going to run problems delivering software. Below six principles, companies can build an effective CI:
1. Single-Source repository
When developers branch and maintain changes off a trunk or main branches, it becomes a complicated process. Members often do not prefer complexity. It also hinders to work with a single source of truth. To avoid this situation, teams need to merge at least once per day. If they do the same for every change, they will get better results.
2. Automation
Automation is a part of CI. Most companies are implementing automation to schedule builds. But in CI practice, they also need to automate the process of testing and validating the builds. Without testing the builds, the effective practice of CI is impossible.
3. Commitment
DevOps team has to build a culture of committing frequently. Developers can set up one automated build and run it on every commit. Otherwise, the whole CI process will break down. If a developer waits one week to commit, others will also have to wait for one week to find the breakage. Thus it breaks the principle.
4. Self-Testing
The testing process has two steps. The first one is to find out which build has failed. Another one is to know if the software is working as expected or not. DevOps team needs to build a self-testing function and automate the process.
5. Fix Issues Immediately
With CI, developers can easily find issues and solve them. This process requires continuous testing, validation, and committing. Thus they automatically get alert when something goes wrong. Then developers can immediately fix the broken builds.
6. Build Quickly
Quick building and integration help to isolate changes quickly. If the process takes a long time to build software, the members will try to commit changes regularly. If it takes a long time to run, other changes will occur within this time. Then it will be hard for the developers’ team to find the issues on time.
Modern technology-Continuous Integration (CI) is creating value for software development organizations. It removes obstacles and improves efficiency. By following core principles, organizations can successfully implement Continuous Integration to get the best result.
