Continuous Integration

What is Continuous Integration

Continuous Integration (CI) is a development practice that requires developers to integrate code into a shared repository several times a day. Each check-in is then verified by an automated build, allowing teams to detect problems early.

ThoughWorks

What is a shared repository?

Version Control in a Nutshell

Feature Branches

Pros of Feature Branches

• Code in there is merged until everything is ready, meaning there's less risk of breaking an integration environment (staging)

Pros of Feature Branches

Downsides of Feature Branches

• QA gets blocked until everything is ready (meaning testing 2 days before a close of sprint)
• Code gets out of date super fast with multiple teams touching the same codebase for different projects
• Merge Conflicts are chaotic

Continuous Integration - No Feature Branches

This sounds very magical, but, how is this really achieved?

Feature Flagging

Feature flagging is a mechanism that allow us to send pieces of code that can be reviewed in an integration environment, but they will not be displayed in production until a feature version is complete

Very similar to A/B Testing

Example of Feature Flagging

This has it's downsides, right?

Yes, some of them:

• Code needs to have additional logic to identify if a flag is turned on/off, in order to execute specific logic
• Code needs to be cleaned up after finishing a feature so the feature flag is no longer required and it's not polluting the code
• Demos have some risks if a flag is turned off for some reason (happened to us)

But at the end, it has more advantages, but it always depends

Thanks

What do you mean with "Integrating Code"?