Scaling Continuous Integration Practices to Teams with Parallel Development

Scaling Continuous Integration
Practices to Teams with Parallel
Development

January 19, 2012

Introduction to Today’s Speakers

Chris Lucca,
Technical Evangelist, AccuRev
Chris' experience dates back to his days as a build / release specialist and
software engineer for IBM-Rational. He has also filled the roles of developer,
release engineer and SCM consultant for numerous organizations. In addition
Chris is a certified scrum master and a frequent speaker at the AccuRev
seminar series.

Now Chris brings the experience and knowledge he has acquired to help keep
others in the industry up-to-date on the latest developments, and how they
can impact them directly.

Copyright © 2012 Urbancode, Inc. and AccuRev, Inc.. All Rights Reserved.

Introduction to Today’s Speakers

Eric Minick,
Lead Consultant, UrbanCode
Eric Minick is a lead consultant at UrbanCode where he helps customers get the
most out of their build, deploy and release processes. He has 8 years of automation
experience throughout the application life-cycle in roles as a developer, test
automation engineer, and support engineer.

Eric has been at the forefront of continuous integration for 5+ years and has worked
on all three generations of UrbanCode’s Anthill. Keep up with Eric'’s latest insights
on UrbanCode’s blog.


Agenda

• Intro to CI
• Overview of Parallel Development
• Adapting CI to the Parallel Dev Challenge
• Q&A


Traditional Development

Write tests
Specify Design Plan Code Integrate Test
Doc

Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep


Traditionally Devs Work in Isolation


Too Much Isolation Leads to Integration Hell


CI: Minimizing Integration Pain

• Integrating frequently is less painful than
infrequently
• But, If we commit frequently blindly, we have a
broken code base

• Implied condition: each integration will not
decrease the code quality
• This is the key to CI
• The rest is implementation details


CI: The Simple Implementation

• How do we determine code quality? We test it
• How do we test code? We build it and run tests
against it
• This is how we get from CI to CI servers and
software builds


So Simple but Very Important

• A build & unit test is a rudimentary check
• Gives important feedback
• The heartbeat of the dev organization


CI at Scale?

• With too many committers into the same code
line, the likelihood something is broken right now
is high

• We stop caring about failures

• The feedback is meaningless, and productivity
suffers. CI becomes “constantly broken”


Reasons People Work In Parallel

It’s often a business reason…not for optimization

• Maintenance Release – Patches
• Customer Specials - Just for one customer
• Development branches – Developer spikes for
experiments that will integrate at an unknown time
• Code Configurations – Different configurations of code
based on environment, such as UAT, QA
• Special Content – Images, binaries


Technical Debt Grows

As code lines diverge, integration becomes a bigger
eventual problem.
… But we don’t always want to merge immediately

• Maintenance Release – Don’t want new features
• Customer Specials – One directional integration
• Development branches – Dev enjoys a stable playground
• Special Content – Reused at different cadence than code


Finding the Isolation / Integration Balance


Integration Is Easy With a Few People

Chapter 1-2 Chapter 1-2 Chapter 2-3 Chapter 1-3 Chapter 1-4


It’s hard at scale

Chapter 1-2 Chapter 1-2 Chapter 2-3 Chapter 1-3 Chapter 1-4


Little Hiccup

• Race condition: I could update to the latest code before
the build/test notifies me it doesn’t compile
• Cost associated with this is huge
• Leads to “interesting solutions”
• Preflight
• Build branches
• Build Acceleration
• Build Avoidance
• Componentization


Cost of Integration

Per week:
• # of check-ins per developer?
• # of developers?
• % of check-ins that break things?
• # of problems encountered per developer?
• Length of time per problem encountered?

200 devs, 2 commits each, 1% are bad = 4 breaks/day

If each breakage cuts productivity 50% for 15
minutes, we lose 100 dev hours / day (@$50/hr =
$5000/day)

Multi-Stage Continuous Integration

ws
Team A
ws

ws CI

int

Team B CI
ws

ws CI

ws

Minutes Hours Daily


•Continuous Integration
•Database Deploy •Automated Tests
•Database Deploy
•Web Deploy •Unit Tests
•Web Deploy
•Binary Deploy •Binary Deploy
•Binary Deploy
•IT Sign-Off •Database Deploy
•Customer Sign-Off •Continuous Integration
•Rollback (if needed) •Web Deploy

x1 x3 x30 x60

x100s x10 x4 x1

x10 x5 x2 x1

5:00 3:00 2:00 0:10

•Continuous Integration
•Automated Tests
•Database Deploy
•Unit Tests
•Web Deploy •Database Deploy
•Binary Deploy
•Binary Deploy •Web Deploy
•Database Deploy
•IT Sign-Off •Binary Deploy
•Customer Sign-Off
•Web Deploy •Team Specific CI
•Rollback (if needed)

A Feature Branch Example

Urbancode’s Website Today… Next (not ready for prime time)

We need two build configurations, deploy configs, test
configs, and test environments


Building and Testing Multiple Code Lines

• Build and test every active code line
(continuously)

• Automatically run code scans, unit tests and
functional tests


CI for a New Code Line Must Be Cheap

• Build and deployment configuration
• Maximize reuse
• Potentially create dynamically

• Tests
• Core regression suites shared across code lines
• Tests for new functionality shared as code is shared

• Test Environments
• No excuse for a lack of test environments today
• Deploy “what’s in production” as a baseline


Deploy Time Integration Is the Same

• In the team’s environment:
• Continuously deploy and execute functional tests
• Regularly (nightly / weekly) deploy other
components that have passed integration tests

• When new features work well, deliver to the
integration test environment

• Releases to Stage & Prod match the full
contents of an earlier test environment


In Closing

• Compile is the first test
• Unit test, deploy, automation can come after
• Get Feedback as Fast as possible
• Different teams need different types of builds
• Separate code configurations based on process
• It’s about people, but tooling helps


What Is AccuRev?
Much more than Version Control…
AccuRevenables Software Process Automation

Best Practices For:
Change
Visual Process
Agile
Management
Compliance Automation Parallel
Version
SCM Control
Global


Urbancode Products

uBuild(AnthillPro)
• Continuous integration and delivery

uDeploy
• Deployment and release management

uCloud(soon)
• Environment provisioning from your private cloud


Q&A

Call: 1-800-383-8170 or Call: +1 216 858-9000
+1-781-861-8700 Email: sales@urbancode.com
Email: sales@accurev.com Visit: www.urbancode.com
Visit: www.accurev.com Learn: blogs.urbancode.com
Learn: blog.accurev.com


Scaling Continuous Integration Practices to Teams with Parallel Development

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

What's hot

What's hot (19)

Viewers also liked

Viewers also liked (6)

Similar to Scaling Continuous Integration Practices to Teams with Parallel Development

Similar to Scaling Continuous Integration Practices to Teams with Parallel Development (20)

More from IBM UrbanCode Products

More from IBM UrbanCode Products (20)

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (20)

Scaling Continuous Integration Practices to Teams with Parallel Development

Editor's Notes