Comments on: CruiseControl != Continuous Integration

By: Robert

Robert — Sat, 27 Jan 2007 23:06:27 +0000

I have to disagree with you on this, Slava… I don’t believe that the build script that developers use, day in day out, should know how to do a production deployment. For one thing, production deployments may not be a simple turn-key operation.

A build script should know how to deploy for the developer – otherwise it can’t run automated tests. The continuous build server should be able to deploy a build for manual testing, either via the build script or some other mechanism (at Wotif, we use CruiseControl to publish builds to a staging server, where our testers have scripts to deploy a named build).

Production deploys, however, can be more complex. In our environment at Wotif, for example, we upgrade one node at a time. While the upgrade step is largely scripted, we don’t want to have this completely automatic at this time.

What I would say is that the build server should publish, as an artifact of the build process, the packaged software ready for the “turn-key” deployment.

By: Slava Imeshev

Slava Imeshev — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 06:52:46 +0000

Our Parabuild support turn-key deployment via build parameters. Indeed, a build script should know what to do when it is requested to run production deployment.

By: Mark

Mark — Fri, 14 Jul 2006 20:59:44 +0000

I completely agree and am still amazed at the misunderstanding around the term ‘Continuous Integration’; it has now become a buzzword which is being used by managers to implement ‘good software development’. If there are no tests, no extra conditions on the build are being checked (e.g. reports, etc.), and no one is actually fixing a broken build – then this is not continuous integration; rather it is just ant being run irregularly!

By: Anoynmous Coward

Anoynmous Coward — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 16:48:38 +0000

well, on the other side the ledger, we don’t do full XP either — iterative waterfall in miniscule increments is really it.