Continuous Build is not Continuous Integration
March 22, 2006
Automated builds have become a cornerstone of agile development. Every time a developer checks in a change, a tool like Cruise Control checks out all the sources, builds everything, runs all the unit tests and reports back with immediate feedback. This cycle has become known as Continuous Integration, due to the seminal paper by Martin Fowler and Matt Foemmel, but this is something of a misnomer. It is better described as Continuous Build. (Their use of “integration” was about integrating all the bits of software that the various programmers in a team would traditionally be working on in isolation from one another, only to bring together and spend days or weeks getting to work. Practices such as pairing and automated builds have all but eliminated this form of integration hell, at least on agile projects.)
However, delivering an application is more than just writing and testing software. The code lives in a container or application server, which runs in an operating system, on hardware, on a network, behind a firewall, connected to other machines, services and components, which may themselves be inside containers or application servers, and so on across your application, across your enterprise and maybe out into the wide world to other enterprises and other servers.
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BDD article published in Better Software magazine
March 19, 2006
So, it’s taken me two years to finally get round to writing down what behaviour-driven development is all about, but I’m pleased with the result. The article has just been published in the March edition of Better Software as “Behavior ((I didn’t quite get away with the UK spelling)) Modification”.
I started talking about BDD as an evolution of TDD at the back end of 2003, and played with the idea of a BDD framework, in the form of JBehave, during 2004. I made some noise about it at the Agile Developers’ Conference in June 2004, and then at the end of the year everything went kind of quiet. That’ll teach me to have a day job.
At the end of last year, I finally got back into BDD evangelist mode, and decided to write the story of behaviour-driven development: where it came from, what it’s about, how it has grown and where it is going. Just when I was busy working out what I wanted to say, by a curious coincidence, Brian Marick approached me to write an article about BDD and JBehave for his excellent magazine, Better Software, which I was targeting as my ideal audience anyway. Hurrah!
You know what to do – rush to the StickyMinds.com site and take out a subscription so you can read the article and tell all your friends about it.
I have to thank Brian and his excellent editorial team, as well as the ThoughtWorkers who gently (!) shepherded me through the process of writing and editing the article. In particular, Liz Keogh, Martin Fowler (yes, that one), Joe Walnes and Rebecca Parsons were extremely helpful and supportive. Thanks guys.
