Continuous Integration
What happens before continuous integration?
In Traditional Integration cycle, each developer gets a copy of the code from the central repository. All developers begin at the same starting point and work on it. Each developer makes progress by working on their own or in a team. They add or change classes, methods, and functions, shaping the code to meet their needs, and eventually, they complete the task they were assigned to do. Meanwhile, the other developers and teams continue working on their own tasks, changing the code or adding new code, solving the problems they have been assigned. If we take a step back and look at the big picture, i.e. the entire project, we can see that all developers working on a project are changing the context for the other developers as they are working on the source code.
So, the above problem can be solved using continuous integration, what is that?
What is Continuous Integration?
Continuous Integration is a software development practice where members of a team integrate their work frequently, usually, each person integrates at least daily leading to multiple integrations per day. Each integration is verified by an automated build (including test) to detect integration errors as quickly as possible. Many teams find that this approach leads to significantly reduced integration problems and allows a team to develop cohesive software more rapidly.
– Martin Fowler
Continuous Integration is a software development practice where you commit and push codebase frequently, preferably after every new, small and specific change is made to the codebase. Each of this integration is accompanied with automated builds and automated tests. One of the very important benefits is that frequent integration makes bugs easier to find and locate. We can argue that Continuous Integration is the best development practice because it has been empirically proved that it doesn’t get you rid of the bugs rather reduces the possibility of bugs manifold. Continuous Integration encourages teams to push frequently without worrying about breaking.
You can use gitlab for doing continuous integration. In which, you have to create a .gitlab-ci.yml file with the required configurations. Now, after every push to your repository, you can create a set of scripts to build and test your application automatically, decreasing the chance of introducing errors to your app.
By using continuous integration now every change made by developers to the repository will go through automate testing and building process. So, we don’t have for all the errors at once because we have checked it at regular intervals.
