How to spread CI to the team

How to spread CI to the team:

Why bother?

• Spread the burden of maintaining the system
• The more that people ensure their code/new feature is easily testable the greater the reduction in complexity of the CI system making it more reliable
• Consequences of bad builds are potentially costly

War Story:

• Fed up doing "continuous repairing" of the build where one person was maintaining the build and tracking down issues when a break was encountered
• Very time consuming and difficult because people were still submitting changes after the build was broken potentially adding other issues
• Made producing builds for demos potentially a nightmare

How do we change the culture to ensure that developers make their code easily testable and or add tests?

• Educate the developers on how to use the testing framework
• Remove any barriers for running the tests (i.e. keep the process as simple as possible)

Alternative to requiring a change in culture:

• Separate features are developed on a separate branch that is automatically spun up from mainline
• Feature branch must run through all tests up to the acceptance tests before being allowed to submit back to mainline

Example setups:

• Jira - Team City - Git
• Subversion for mainline - Git for branches
• Team Foundation Server for mainline - Git for clients
• Team City - Perforce