Build & Continuous Integration Maturity – Are We There Yet?

Talk, by Manuel Pais
Tuesday, June 21, 15:35 – 17:05 @ B 002

Continuous Integration (CI) has become mainstream terminology in the software world but have good build & CI practices become the norm yet? Or are these just buzzwords for impressing your peers (or scaring them away)?

We conducted an online anonymous survey to assess actual industry practices (particularly in Portugal, where more than half of the answers originate from) for version control, building, integration, unit testing and deployment. The results indicate that some core practices such as building after commit or unit test automation aren’t as widespread as expected.

This talk will present a staged view of build and CI practices so that attendees can contextualize their own organization’s maturity. We believe that the lack of overview on existing practices and how they build upon each other constitutes an obstacle for many organizations to understand where they stand and which CI practices adoption would bring them most benefit.

For each stage in the ladder to build and continuous integration maturity we will look at survey results and present symptoms and common practices at that level of maturity for attendees to identify their own situation. Then we present steps to take in order to reach the next maturity level and what is the ROI to get there.

At the end of the stages walkthrough attendees will be able to identify concrete steps to improve their practices and reduce effort wasted struggling with build and integration issues in their organizations.

Finally we will briefly explain the link between continuous integration and continuous delivery, i.e. how CI can be complemented with other good practices to not only integrate frequently but also deploy working code to production frequently (and why you should).