[ 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.”