In yesterday’s article I discuss some of the things that could be tripping you up on the way to production.
Your continuous integration platform (CI) is one of the most important pieces of the jigsaw. It exists to enable you to release your software at any time. But how do you know if your CI is working for you and not against you?
Any of this sound familiar?
- Your CI pipeline runs only unit tests, and then sometimes you ignore failures.
- Complicated integration tests get skipped or they are not implemented fully.
- Your build and test cycle takes so long that you can only run the pipeline once a day or over night.
- You have constantly failing tests.
- You have long lived (unintegrated) branches.
Additionally do we even support a branching strategy that allows us to fully integrate even once a day?
If you are not integrating all of your branches, or you’re not doing trunk based development, then you’re not able to release your software with confidence.
Fixing CI is never a quick or simple job. It often gets pushed out, it is seen as unimportant work. But neglecting your CI means a lot of manual testing before release. Fix it and you will be rewarded with the knowledge that you’ll be able to release at any time.