We're not Continuous Integration. What are we?

Scott Seltzer's picture
Scott Seltzer asked on October 3, 2017 - 11:26am | Replies (1).

I'm trying to figure out the proper terminology for our dev/test procedure.

1. The main master codebase in bitbucket.

2. Developers make their code changes (bug fixes, feature improvements) and create pull requests/feature branches that contain their code commits. They are not saved directly into master (so not CI). Each jira issue generally has one corresponding pull request.

3. QA uses Jenkins to deploy individual (or sometimes multile) pull requests on top of the master to our test environments (each QAer has their own test server). So, we are able test the addition of just one change at a time. We do full functional testing and any regression testing we think might be relevant.

4. After QA approves the change, we merge the pull request into the master.

I've worked in QA for 23 years and I'm very very happy with the system we're using. Instead of dev giving us a full iterative version to test, we test and add the parts piece by piece. Nothing gets merged untested so we have great control and minimal risk.

I'm pretty sure it's not Continuous Integration as I've read about it. I thought of the term controlled integration since we carefully check every little thing before it gets integrated, and I see that there is such a concept but I'm not sure that we're doing that either. Or are we? Or something else?

1 Answer

Justin Rohrman's picture

The term Coutinuous Integration is pretty overloaded at this point. In one regard, it is a software platform that acts as a glorified scheduler gathering up code changes, running tests, and producing and maybe deploying a build. It is also a process. As process goes, there are lots of different interpretations and there is a pretty broad space where we can define things.

 

FWIW, I would consider that CI as long as they are merging and integrating code into some branch. it doesn't necessarily have to be the main branch. Also, if you're not comfortable with that, feel free to coin a new phrase that works for your context :)

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