Continuous Integration

[nikmacintosh]

👋 Introduction

🖥→☁️

A wise developer once said, "a build shall never be made from a developer's local machine, yo."

👊 Motivation

It is common on software projects for developers to work in parallel. At some point, it is necessary to integrate all of these parallel streams of work into one codebase that makes up the final product. In the early days of software development, this integration was performed at the end of a project, which was a difficult and risky process.

Continuous Integration (CI) avoid such complexities by merging every developer's changes into the common code base on a continual basis, usually whenever any developers checks in changes to the project's shared code repository. Each check-in triggers an automated build and runs automated tests to verify that the newly introduced code didn’t break any existing code. In this way, CI surfaces errors and problems immediately and ensures that all team members stay up to date with each other's work. This results in a cohesive and stable codebase.

-- Introduction to Continuous Integration with Xamarin

📓 Proposal

• Integrate the Github repository with one of the continuous integration providers mentioned under Alternatives
• Pull requests indicate if they build and test successfully
• Changes to (at least) master and develop trigger new builds for supported devices
• Email / SMS / FB Messenger / Slack notification indicating a new build

🤓 Implementation

// TODO

• Need to assess the various alternatives for the one with most pros versus cons
• Introduction to Continuous Integration with Xamarin

💣 Impact

• Pull requests will need to successfully build and pass tests before being merge-able
• The full system is more complex

⚖️ Alternatives

• Visual Studio Team Services
• Travis CI
• Team City
• Jenkins

[nikmacintosh]

It looks like first-class support comes with Visual Studio Team Services. Looks to be good news, in that this is a very polished option (we shouldn't need to dig into the internals too much).

Explain-to-me-like-I'm-five blog articles: 1. Continuous Integration for Android Apps with Visual Studio Team Services 2. Continuous Integration for iOS Apps with Visual Studio Team Services