What is the right mix of practices and tools for introducing CI

lialererch noc4tcoeldr nozelviac Facilitated by Jeff Frederick

What pain will they address?

• Expensive (latent) release cycles
  • Make it easier to do what I want to do
  • Spend less time doing mundane activities
• Engage in higher-value activities rather than repetitive manual tasks
• Remove some obstacles to communication and collaboration
  • Increase happiness
  • Overcome “culture of blame”
  • Accountability and empowerment
• Improve visibility and assurance of code quality
  • Sense of accomplishment
  • More confidence / courage
  • Reduce need to re-write due to lack of knowledge / hit-by-bus
  • Ship more often, happier customer, underpants gnomes PROFIT!

Where do I start

• Recognise we have a problem
• Consensus on what the problems are and that we want to change
• Identify the outcomes we would like to have
• Listen & understand how the issues impact others
• Change behaviours
  • Empathetic, trust-building
  • Pick some easy wins to build momentum
  • May make it feel worse before it gets better
  • Frequent retrospectives (perhaps daily)
  • Talk to each other (across teams). Brown bags, socialise, catch up over lunch
  • Co-located cross-functional team
  • Light-hearted embarrassment tokens / achievement awards
• Measurements
  • “Tasks completed each period” (e.g. Stories per iteration)
  • Look at valuable quantitative metrics (e.g. Cyclomatic complexity)
• Code reviews
  • Set the context for positive outcome – it’s not for the mob-flaming of the code author or their skills
  • Impromptu: “Hey there, whatchya doin?”
  • Ask questions to understand design intent
  • Ask someone to look at yours
  • Have the strong developers demonstrate good examples for others to learn from
  • Knowledge sharing
• Don’t fall for overly-draconian style rules early on

Tools

To Start

• The Basics
  • Unit tester (e.g. JUnit)
  • Builder (e.g. Ant)
  • CI server (e.g. CC)
  • Coverage (improving trend)
  • Change notification
  • “Basic” code consistency checks

• Consistent code
  • Jalopy
  • Checkstyle
  • IntelliJ inspections

• Change set notification, review tools
  • SCM commit triggers
  • FishEye
  • RSS

• Coverage
  • Clover, Cobertura
  • Emma

Later

• “Problematic code” detection
  • Findbugs
  • Google singleton collector
  • Complexian, Jeff’s “Crap4J”
  • Simian
  • PPMD

• Test veracity
  • Agitator
  • Jester

• What files are being changed by others?
  • Crucible
  • Conflict

• Profiling, performance tuning
  • JProbe, etc