- A Day in the Life of CI
- What Is the Value of CI?
- What Prevents Teams from Using CI?
- How Do I Get to "Continuous" Integration?
- When and How Should a Project Implement CI?
- The Evolution of Integration
- How Does CI Complement Other Development Practices?
- How Long Does CI Take to Set Up?
- CI and You
- Commit Code Frequently
- Don't Commit Broken Code
- Fix Broken Builds Immediately
- Write Automated Developer Tests
- All Tests and Inspections Must Pass
- Run Private Builds
- Avoid Getting Broken Code
- Summary
- Questions
How Long Does CI Take to Set Up?
Implementing a basic CI system along with simple build scripts for a new project may take you a few hours to set up and configure (more if you don't have any existing build scripts). As you expand your knowledge of the CI system, it will grow with the addition of inspection tools, deployments that are more complex, more thorough testing, and many other processes. These additional features tend to be added a little at a time.
For a project already in progress, it can take days, weeks, or even months to set up a CI system. It also depends upon whether people have been dedicated to work on the project. Usually you must complete many tasks when moving to a continuous, automated, and headless system such as when using a CI server. In some cases, you may be moving from batch or shell scripts to a build scripting tool such as Ant or managing all of the project's binary dependencies. In other cases, you may have previously used your IDE for "integration" and deployment. Either way, the road map to full CI adoption could be quite a bit longer.