Beyond Legacy Code

Chapter 7Practice 3: Integrate Continuously

There are two ways to deal with pain: avoid it, or acclimate to it.

Integrating software into the build can be painful, exposing bugs and other issues that weren’t visible before. Many software development teams try to avoid that pain by putting integration off until as late as possible only to find that integrating their code just before release is a lot more painful. Like the woodcutter who is too busy to sharpen his saw, these teams create situations that require more effort and risk than needed.

But what if instead of putting off the pain of integration, they tried to acclimate to it? What if they work on it a little bit at a time until it becomes a series of smaller problems—each less painful? ...