What Are Tools For Continuous Integration And Its Benefits?

As a tester, if you have great ideas but you are not able to present them efficiently, it will be extremely hard for you to stay in the competition. Through this article, we will try to help you and solve this exact problem efficiently and simply.

What is Continuous Integration?

Continuous integration is the software engineering process that we use in DevOps. To isolate the changes their test can be done immediately and report while they are adding to the larger codebase.CI strives to provide quick feedback that helps detect errors or defects in the codebase. So we can notice and correct it as soon as possible. You can automate testing using software tools. The goal of continuous integration was to have an extreme programming shift. So that the principles of continuous integration can be implemented in a programming model that follows an iterative path.

When the integration continues to conceptualize. It becomes standard practice to have a daily build and evolve even more. Where teams can submit their code on a very frequent basis so they can conduct build with the changes made. Due to the implementation of the CI process, you can deduct errors at a much earlier stage. This saves a lot of time and money. As when we deduct the error in the later stage. It becomes much more difficult to correct and this reflects directly in the money, effort, and time that has to be spent.

Also Read: How To Optimize Continuous Integration Testing?

Git and CI

You can take advantage of the modern version control system, such as Git. It’s very useful in creating short-lived branches to isolate work. There is an extraction request by the encoder after the completion of the resource and when the request is approved, the changes are incorporated into the main branch. Once it is done, the previous resource branch can be deleted. The development team needs to repeat the process for extra work. The Company policies could be established to view the main branch according to the desired criteria. Any commitment to the main branch will trigger the automated build and test process. When incidents are detected at the beginning of the development cycle stage, it is relatively inexpensive, and continuous integration ensures that this is possible. Automated tests that run in each build will take care of maintaining consistent build quality.

Some standard practices of a continuous integration process:

1. Have a dedicated continuous integration machine
2. Have a continuous feedback process as well
3. The tests of the grouped developers
4. Frequent comments in the base code

Continuous Integration Testing

The purpose of Continuous Integration is to use it in combination with automated unit tests, that are written using test-driven development practices. This means that unit tests run in the developer’s on-premises environment and is made sure that it is passed before committing to the main branch. In this way, you can ensure that the work of an ongoing developer does not harm a copy of another developer’s work. You can turn off partially complete features before committing.

The continuous integration process introduces the build server in later stages that automatically run unit tests regularly or even after each ‘commit’ is complete, and the results are reported to the developer. The practice of using the build server and not the unit test run is implemented by the software developer community. To automate unit testing, organizations use a continuous integration methodology that is typically done using a build server to implement the ongoing process for applying quality control that includes the small efforts that are frequently applied to make the continuous integration process successful.

This type of process is used to run unit and integration tests, running along with static and dynamic tests. You can extract and format the documentation process and measure and analyze source code performance and facilitate the manual quality assurance process. Likewise, the Continuous Integration methodology can also be applied to the QA process. When you are working with continuous integration, the next step would logically be continuous deployment, which is extending the benefits of continuous integration to the deployment stage so that actual deployments can be made.

Tools for Continuous Integration

1. Jenkins is one of the best tools in Continuous Integration that is open source. It is written in Java and allows you to configure using the GUI interface and console commands. It is one of the most flexible tools for continuous integration and has many feature extensions through a variety of plugins.
2. Bamboo – It is a Continuous Integration tool developed by Atlassian. It’s available with a cloud and server version. The cloud version is hosted on the Amazon EC2, other Atlassian tools such as BitBucket and JIRA are supported by Bamboo.
3. Apache Gump helps you compile software code and detect changes that are not compatible with the code as soon as these changes have been included in the version control systems.
4. CircleCI is hosted on GitHub. The CircleCI Continuous Integration tool supports a variety of languages, including Python, Java, Ruby on Rails, PHP, and others. CircleCI makes use of containers to offer its services.
5. Buildbot is another tool for continuous integration that is open source and helps integrate, build, and test processes in an automated way. You can use Buildbot on many operating systems such as Windows and Linux. It supports integration with various software management and configuration tools.
6. TeamCity is another Java-based continuous integration tool. Supports the Ruby, Net, and Java platform tools. You can get a variety of free plugins for TeamCity and also integration with various IDEs like Eclipse, IntelliJ, and more. You can create and test TeamCity across multiple environments and platforms.
7. Travis CI is an open-source continuous integration tool that is hosted on GitHub. This tool supports multiple languages and is platform-independent. Applications in Travis CI are created using virtual machines.

Continuous Integration In DevOps

When developers are working on the continuous integration process, each developer will receive a copy of the current code base to start the work. From when more developers will submit their change to code in the source code repository, it is obvious that the copy does not look like the original in the repository code. This changed copy can not only accommodate the change in the existing code base but also the new code can be added to it. Adding along with new libraries when needed. The longer it takes for a certain section of code to remain outside the repository, the more difficult it is to resolve the various conflicts that occur because multiple developers try to integrate it back into the repository.

Code in the repository

When developers want to send the code to the repository, they must update the code so that changes to the repository are reflected from the moment they took the copy of the code. The greater the number of changes to the repository, the greater the number of work developers must do to submit the changes they have made to the repository.

Full build and run test

Some organizations have a slightly different version of working with Continuous Integration, that is, before submitting the job, they must do a full build and run test and also ensure that the code passes the test. This type of test can run on a Continuous Integration server automatically as it detects a new code commit.

Continuous Integration aspires to have the process in place so that new and changed code is in the code store and there is no time conflict between commit and build. This excludes the need for errors that may arise without developers being able to notice and fix them. It gives the benefit of triggering builds, thanks to each commit in the repository. You can deploy version control in the software through the continuous integration methodology. Version control is also called revision control. This applies to the project code. To run the version control system, the build project artefacts must be placed in the repository.

Continuous Integration Benefits

Continuous integration comes as a benefit to the software development community. He redefined the old software building and deployment practices for the client in a different way.

Some of the obvious benefits of continuous integration are as follows:

1. Improves developer productivity
2. Helps you find the fastest bugs
3. You can deliver updates faster
4. There are no surprises in the end because there is no incompatibility
5. There are no long and tense integration processes
6. Checks the viability of the code without having to wait
7. The consensus when it comes to often automated testing
8. The latest version of the test, demo and release is always available

Continuous Integration is defining how organizations are deploying DevOps to streamline the entire software development lifecycle process. Future-oriented companies are heavily investing in processes, tools, methodologies, and best practices of continuous integration. It is only a matter of time before continuous integration becomes mandatory for all software companies to create software that meets customers’ stringent requirements.

Also Read: Best Practices Of Continuous Integration And Continuous Development