The Agile Samurai

How Does It Work?

To set up a continuous integration system, you need a few things:

• A source code repository

• A check-in process

• An automated build

• A willingness to work in small chunks

Source code repositories store and version your software. This is what your development team “checks” their code into. It is the integration point of your project and keeps a master copy of your code. Open source repositories like Git or Subversion are your friends here.

Just make sure you avoid pessimistic locking (which means that only one developer can work on a file at a single time). It will frustrate your developers, slow your team down, and prevent your team from collectively owning the code base.

A good check-in process is more interesting. ...