How Continuous Integration Can Save Your Team Substantial Time and Effort
Everything in life has a feedback loop, if you ask principal consultant and member of the core team at Agile Artisans, Jared Richardson. A leads to B. B leads to C. What you put in leads to what you produce, and while that’s something you can apply to just about anything outside of work, it’s especially critical when it comes to software development.
Continuous integration is all about the feedback loops between your developers, testers, product owners, customers, and everyone involved in your organization. That’s great to write as if it’s gospel, but what can continuous integration and continuous testing do for you right now to improve efficiency?
According to Richardson, who recently spoke with StickyMinds about the nature of a continuous environment, the benefits can be astronomical.
“I find almost every team out there could benefit greatly to the tune of upwards of half their time. I've seen teams be more than half their time being spent fixing issues that a CI/CT system would eliminate,” he explains. “The problem is they've become acclimated to the pain.
“They think it's normal to merge in everybody else's changes and have things break. They don't realize how many things they're breaking. They don't realize how many things their coworkers are breaking.”
For a lot of teams, this is normal. Breaking things and having to fix them or, even worse, passing them off to the next person, has become commonplace. And as long as the software still ships and nothing blows up, why change?
You change because there might be problems you’re dealing with on a daily basis you never realized are both slowing down the process and creating unnecessary bugs. Tightening up these feedback loops is always the goal, and continuous integration helps you do so by helping pinpoint exactly when something breaks.
Richardson argues that its biggest value comes when shipping software.
“So many teams will work for six months, and they end up taking another three months to harden it all,” he continues. “If your system doesn't break because you have a good test system in place, where the test suites are covering the major scenarios, you can't break it at the second month mark, and then discover it at the fourth month mark, because QA was busy.”
A proper continuous integration system spots functional issues, highlights the broken spots, and maybe most importantly, greatly lessens the stress that normally comes along with a release. You should strive to shorten your feedback loops, because only then can you become truly efficient.
