Dec 30, 2023 • 7 min
Months ago, I made the observation that engineers seem to enjoy administrative tasks seeing how much affection they show for the Pull Request. Malik reacted to this with “Show me a different process that guarantees a green mainline”. Manifestly, the answer to that is: Agree as a Team to Never Break the Build. To this, Malik replied: “‘agreeing to never break the build’ is like agreeing to never produce a bug… It’s nonsensical, why not prevent the issue in the first place instead of playing a blame game where the developer is bound to fail at some point?”. In all honesty, I appreciate Malik. We do not often agree online. But we are somehow aligned on the outcomes, i.e. have a green mainline. We just use different techniques to get there. Having said that, I decidedly disagree with Malik.
Mar 12, 2023 • 5 min
Recently, as a reaction to the Practices that make Continuous Integration, someone suggested on LinkedIn the Pull Request based approach without formal reviews could supersede Agree as a Team to Never Break the Build. The benefit would be it removes the need to rely on team agreements to avoid broken builds. Now they would be guaranteed by the Pull Request build. As attractive as this looks, it ignores everything that emanates from Agree as a Team to Never Break the Build.
Sep 28, 2022 • 16 min
In part 1 - Team Working for Continuous Integration we looked into the team practices that make Continuous Integration. In part 2 - Coding for Continuous Integration we explored the engineering practices for Continuous Integration. In this last part, we investigate the required practices for a team to succeed with Continuous Integration, i.e. which are the building practices and how to improve builds to support the team practices - especially Agree as a Team to Never Break the Build - and the coding practices - in particular Make Changes in Small Increments and Commit Frequently.
Sep 25, 2022 • 16 min
In part 1 - Team Working for Continuous Integration we looked at all the necessary practices to achieve team work around Continuous Integration. Now, we investigate the critical engineering practices individuals, pairs or ensembles should adopt to attain Continuous Integration as a team.
Sep 17, 2022 • 10 min
This first part of this series investigates the practices that enable teamwork that in turn enable Continuous Integration. Continuous Integration is a Team Practice. We achieve it as a team and not as a set of individuals. Most of the time, practices are defined for individuals. When most team members apply them, the team does well. However, with Continuous Integration, most team members have to implement other practices before the team can say they practice Continuous Integration.
Oct 2, 2018 • 17 min
In this post, Leena interviews Thierry de Pauw, a Software Engineer who coaches on Continuous Delivery and other Software Engineering Practices. His focus is helping teams to improve the flow of software delivery.