Agile Network India | Continuous Integration & Continuous Deployment & Automation in Testing | Rajesh Dadlaney

Continuous Integration in
Agile Software Development

Continuous Integration (CI) involves producing
a clean build of the system several times per
day, usually with a tool like CruiseControl,
which uses Ant and various source-control
systems. Agile teams typically configure CI to
include automated compilation, unit test
execution, and source control integration.

Benefits of Continuous Integration
 Helps the code stay robust enough so stakeholders can modify/re-link code whenever
they like.
 Speeds the flow of development work overall.
 Encourages more feedback between programmers and customers.
 Helps team get things right before iteration deadlines.
 Continuous integration works well if you have an exhaustive suite of automated unit
tests that ensure that you are not committing buggy code.
 Skillful CI means that integration is never a headache as work reflects only slight
divergence from the codebase.
 CI enables team to regularly deal with small-scale divergences, so they never have to
deal with truly scary ones.
 CI provides opportunities to discuss different design approaches on the day that they
arise.

DEFINITION
Teams practicing continuous integration seek two objectives:
 minimize the duration and effort required by each
integration episode
 be able to deliver a product version suitable for release at
any moment
The objectives require an integration procedure which is
reproducible at the very least, and largely automated. This is
achieved through version control tools, team policies and
conventions, and tools specifically designed to help achieve
continuous integration.

COMMON PITFALLS
 The practice of CI should not be confused with the tools that
assist it (CI servers such as Cruise Control, Hudson, etc.). CI
is first and foremost a matter of attitude rather than tools,
and it relies on more than one tool: tools for testing, tools
for automating build processes, and tools for version control.
 Continuous Integration aims to lessen the pain of integration by
increasing its frequency. Therefore, “any” effort related to
producing intermediate releases, and which the team experiences
as particularly burdensome, is a candidate for inclusion in the
team’s continuous integration process.

SIGNS OF USE
For most teams, CI in practice amounts to the following:
 Use of a version control tool (CVS, SVN, Git, etc.)
 An automated build and product release process
 Instrumentation of the build process to trigger tests “every
time any change is published to version control”
 In the event of even a single test failing, alerting the team of
a “broken build” so that the team can reach a stable, releasable
baseline again soonest
 Optionally, use of a tool such as a CI server, which automates
the process of integration, testing and reporting of test
results

Mobile CI
Architecture
Diagram

Continuous
Delivery
Evolutionary
Architecture

Agile Network India | Continuous Integration & Continuous Deployment & Automation in Testing | Rajesh Dadlaney

BUDDY is a modern and intuitive CI tool. By keeping the
interface simple Buddy makes the user experience the top
priority and the time you need to invest in learning the
tool to the minimum (which is nice).
Wizard-like type of configurations make the tool easy to
work with, and there is practically no need to read the
documentation until you need to configure some of the more
complex pipelines.
What makes it a modern CI tool is the wide variety of
supported tools/integrations, fast build times, smart but
flexible UI, different hosting options (cloud/on-premises)
and configurable pricing plans. Buddy fulfills all the above
and goes beyond.
Buddy supports Docker, Kubernetes, all the major frameworks,
languages and cloud providers, including PHP, Node, Python,
.NET Core and Rails, as well as AWS and Google Cloud
services. You can also rely on Buddy to provide monitoring
and notifications for your builds.

TEAMCITY is the mature CI server by JetBrains. JetBrains has
established authority in the software development world, and
developers all over the world use their tools like WebStorm
and ReSharper.
TeamCity offers all the features in its free version, but it
is limited to 100 builds and 3 build agents. A 60-day trial
version of TeamCity also is available on cloud where we can
try it out for one project without a hassle of having to
install it on-premises.
TeamCity works on many different platforms and has the
support for wide variety of tools and frameworks. There are
many publicly available plugins, developed both by JetBrains
and third parties.
Despite being the Java-based solution, TeamCity offers the
best .NET support among the tools on this list. There are
also different enterprise packages, that scale by the number
of agents your company needs.

When Oracle bought Sun Microsystems, then known as Fork-For-
Hudson, Jenkins is an open-source CI tool written in
Java. It is a cross-platform CI tool and offers
configuration both through GUI interface and console
commands.
What makes Jenkins very flexible is the feature extension
through plugins which is very comprehensive and we can
easily add our own. Besides extensibility, Jenkins prides
itself on distributing builds and test loads on multiple
machines. It is published under MIT license so it is free to
use and distribute.
Cloudbees also offers hosted solution in the form of the
Jenkins in the Cloud.
Verdict: One of the best solutions out there, both powerful
and flexible at the same time. The learning curve could be a
bit steep, but if you need flexibility it very well pays off
to learn how to use it.

Travis CI is one of the oldest hosted solutions out
there and it has won the trust of many people.
Although it’s mostly known for the hosted solution,
it offers the on-premise version too.
Travis CI is free for all open source projects hosted
on the GitHub and for the first 100 builds otherwise.
the main difference being the number of concurrent
builds you can run as compare to priced.
Builds are configured using .travis.yml file which
contains the build tasks that will be executed on
running the build. It supports a variety of different
languages and a good documentation to back them up.
Verdict: A Mature solution that offers both hosted
and On-premises variants, loved and used by many
teams, very well documented.

Atlassian is the company focused on providing tools for
software development teams and you might know them by their
tools like JIRA & BitBucket. Bamboo originally offered both
cloud and On-premises solutions, but later discontinued its
cloud version in May 2016.
By utilizing the power of Docker, Bitbucket Pipelines is
offering very efficient and fast builds that and is rapidly
growing and becoming a worthy successor to the Bamboo Cloud.
Bamboo is free to try for 30 days later needs to be
purchased. Being the Atlassian tool, it has the native
support for JIRA and BitBucket and you can even import your
Jenkins configurations into the Bamboo easily.
Verdict: Great On-premises CI tool that originally offered
Cloud solution too. Bitbucket Pipelines replaced the cloud
solution. Pipelines is a modern and fast cloud CI tool
integrated into Bitbucket. Has a free trial for 30 days, and
paid plans after that.

GitLab CI (by GitLab inc) is an integral part of the
open-source Rails project GitLab. It is hosted on
GitLab.com, a free hosted service and it provides
detailed GIT repository management with features like
access control, issue tracking, code reviews and much
more.
GitLab CI integrates seamlessly with GitLab and it
can easily hook projects using the GitLab API. GitLab
runners that process builds are written in Go
language and can run on Windows, Linux, OSX, FreeBSD,
and Docker.
Can run multiple jobs concurrently and has inbuilt
Docker support. Gitlab CI comes with both the open-
source GitLab Community Edition and with the GitLab
Enterprise Edition.
Verdict: A Phenomenal hosted tool with impressive
list of features, offers both free and enterprise
solutions.

Another cloud alternative that comes from the company with
the same name. CircleCI currently only supports GitHub and
the list of supported languages includes Java, Ruby/Rails,
Python, Node.js, PHP, Haskell, and Scala.
What separates CircleCI from the other tools is the way they
offer services. One container is free and you can build as
many projects on it as you need. Once you start adding more
containers (at a fixed price each) you can choose the level
of parallelization that suits your needs.
There are 5 levels of parallelization (1x, 4x, 8x, 12x and
16x). So, starting with the 16 containers, you can achieve
maximum parallelization of 16x on one build. Or you can run
4 builds on 16 containers with 4x parallelization. It is up
to you.
CircleCI supports Docker..
Verdict: Flexible cloud CI tool that offers parallelization
up to 16x. Excellent if you need something built fast and
money is not the biggest issue (can reach up to $3150/mo).

Codeship comes in two different versions: Basic and
Pro. Basic version offers out-of-the-box Continuous
Integration service but doesn’t have docker support
and its main purpose is to build applications with
common workflows through the UI. Pro version
offers more flexibility and docker support.
The basic version comes in several paid packages,
where the more expensive ones have more
parallelization power. In the pro version, you get to
choose your instance type and the amount of
parallelization up to 20x). It can get a bit pricey,
but some teams may need that kind of power.
Verdict: Powerful hosted solution with docker
support, flexible plans suited both for small teams
and enterprises alike.

Most tools have Docker support, but Codefresh was designed and
built from the ground up specifically with the containers in mind.
Docker can be a bit overwhelming to figure out at first, and
Codefresh inc. are aware of that. In addition to working with
existing docker files, you can choose from several different
templates to ease the migration of your project to Docker
containers. UI is clean and intuitive, there is almost no need to
parse through the documentation to start using it.
The reason this CI tool deserves to be on the list lies in a
feature that surprised me a bit. And that feature is launching your
images to a stage-like environment. When the build finishes, you
can launch the image to see if it works! That effectively means you
get a staging environment without a need to provision additional
virtual machines or deploy anything. And that’s great!
Codefresh is still very young and has room for improvement and new
features, (eg. .NET core template and more deployment options), but
it treats containers as a first class citizen and that makes it an
ideal solution for any team that plans to utilize Docker.
Verdict: Easy to use tool with Docker containers at its core and
very nice feature of launching the built Docker images to the
hosted environment.

Agile Network India | Continuous Integration & Continuous Deployment & Automation in Testing | Rajesh Dadlaney

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Agile Network India | Continuous Integration & Continuous Deployment & Automation in Testing | Rajesh Dadlaney