Continuous integration with Buildbot

[ Thanks to An Anonymous Reader for this link. ]

"Summary: The days of cowboy coding are long gone at most organizations, replaced by a renewed interest in generating quality software. Continuous integration (CI) testing is a vital component in the practice of agile programming techniques that lead to high-quality software. Learn the theory and practice of CI testing by exploring Buildbot, an open source CI system written in Python.

"Largely popularized by Martin Fowler, the basic idea of CI is to continuously test and build your software at each branch and when code is merged into the trunk. This leads to an overall increase in the health of the code base. It can also lead to an increase in communication with team members and an opportunity to obtain feedback about the overall quality of your code. Often, people use this cycle to generate code coverage reports and other statistics.

"Buildbot, like other CI systems, helps to automate this cycle of checkout, build, test. Buildbot slaves usually run on different platforms such as Win32, Solaris, Intelx64, etc. Buildbot can send an email notification when a build breaks, and it keeps track of all running builds so the developer can get a bird's-eye view of the whole process. Finally, people often tap into the automated cycle to generate metrics about the quality of their software at any given time. The end of this article touches on metrics and why it makes sense to run them within a CI system."

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