Cotocus simplifies continuous integration for your applications for all platforms and all languages. As part of our development and support workflow, we have gradually built up a Continuous Integration (CI) platform to run automated tests and builds. It’s become such an essential part of our ever-growing toolkit that we are now offering it as a service to select customers.
Continuous integration (CI) is a software engineering practice in which isolated changes are immediately tested and reported on when they are added to a larger code base. The goal of CI is to provide rapid feedback so that if a defect is introduced into the code base, it can be identified and corrected as soon as possible. Continuous integration software tools can be used to automate the testing and build a document trail.
According to Paul Duvall, co-author of Continuous Integration: Improving Software Quality and Reducing Risk, best practices of CI include:
How Continuous Integration will help your organization?
1. Manual Tests Are Only a Snapshot
Continuous Integration tests your code against the current state of your code base and always in the same (production-like) environment, so you can spot any integration challenges right away.
2. Increase Your Code Coverage
Eevery time you commit something new without any tests, you will feel the shame that comes with having your coverage percentage go down because of your changes. Seeing code coverage increase over time is a motivator for the team to write tests
3. Deploy Your Code to Production
A CI system can automatically deploy your code to staging or even production if all the tests within a specific branch are green. This is what is formally known as Continuous Deployment. Changes before being merged can be made visible in a dynamic staging environment, and once they are merged these can be deployed directly to a central staging, pre-production, or production environment.
4. Build Stuff Now and Faster
You can run any long-running processes as a part of your CI builds and the CI system will notify you if anything goes wrong, even restarting or triggering certain processes if needed. With parallel build support, you can split your tests and build processes over different machines (VMs/containers), so the total build time will be much shorter than if you ran it locally.
5. Decrease Code Review Time
You can have your CI and Version Control System communicate with each other and tell you when a merge request is good to merge: the tests have passed and it meets all requirements. In addition, even the difference in code coverage can be reported right in the merge request. This can dramatically reduce the time it takes to review a merge request.
6. Build Repeatable Processes
Modern development teams are building efficient software delivery engines by creating repeatable processes that standardize development best practices. With automated testing, your code is tested in the same way for every change, so you can trust that every change is tested before it goes to production.
See the benefits of Continuous integration with us
Cotocus Offers you
Training – Cotocus Training program guide your development or programming teams through the principals and best practices of Continuous Integration. Our Coaches do this through lecture, exercises and hands-on mentoring. We know every team is different and has unique barriers in the process of Continuous Delivery. So whether your teams are struggling with the revision control system or how to deal with broken builds our coaches try to guide you towards successful delivery.
Consulting - Cotocus Consulting can help you introduce Continuous Integration into your organization. We can review your existing development infrastructure and practices, discuss where Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery could help you, and determine the best way to get there. We can also evaluate and discuss other related practices, such as source code management, automated testing and automated code quality, that are part of the bigger CI picture.