1/02/2012

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery

This is the first blog of a series of posts about the topics continuous integration and continuous delivery. It explains how important continuous integration is to deliver software in short iterations to the customer with a high quality standard.

Everybody of you faced for sure problems with incomplete or just bad specifications. Additionally a software has to be frequently changed due to new or updated requirements. That's why agile software development processes and techniques are so successful. But a good agile software development processes also implies a continuous delivery to the customer in my opinion. Only like this it is possible to verify if the features match the customers thoughts. But the software can or should be just delivered if it fulfils the quality standard.

I think (almost) everybody delivered already a piece of software which was crashing on the first use. This is frustrating for the customer and gives also a bad picture about the development team. And that is exactly where continuous integration comes into play. It ensures a certain defined quality standard and enables the possibility to define quality gates in order to prevent crucial software failures.

I would like to give you some hints what is important about continuous integration and how you can set up a configurable team foundation server 2010 build workflow with a lot of features and quality gates to ensure a software which works and fulfils the customer needs.

The following build workflow steps will be covered in the next posts:
I am going to explain how to set up each build process, the reason for each step as well as pros and cons.

After that I want to focus on the Delivery Process and which challenges are waiting in this area:

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