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.
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- Code gets out of date super fast with multiple teams touching the same codebase for different projects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"?
