Continuous Integration

What is Continuous Integration?

The cost and effort required to fix a bug increases exponentially if found in later stages of the SDLC, while also increasing risk. It is therefore crucial to find and fix bugs as soon as they are introduced.

Have you been in a situation where multiple code changes have been committed to your application and something then breaks? How do you find out which change caused the problem? Usually, this scenario leads to multiple exchanges with the bug being passed from developer to developer trying to detect where the bug was introduced.

Distributed version control systems like Git, while offering many other benefits, have exacerbated the problem by allowing developers to make changes independently to the same pieces of code. The result? Repeated instances of ‘Integration hell’.

The best way to address this problem is with a software development best practice called Continuous Integration (CI) which helps improves software quality without slowing down releases. Every code commit is immediately integrated into a common shared repository and is automatically built and tested. The developer making the code change gets immediate feedback and can fix bugs easily if required since every bug can be tracked down to a commit. With Shippable, you can easily set up Continuous integration for your source code repositories.

• Simple yml based config so your CI scripts are versioned and live in your source control.
• Powerful Docker support with native integrations with all Docker Registries and Container Services.
• Support for pull request builds so you can merge PRs knowing that your build won't break and tests will pass.