Continuous Integration at Agile 2008

You might have noticed that I am taking a great interest in the practice of Continuous Integration (especially in the tool Hudson, of course!).

Agile 2008 is just around the corner, and I’m particularly eager to hear the latest about CI. Here is a selection.

• David Vydra will host a Workshop on build/test grids and selective testing tools, the goal being to inventory current techniques and tools and to actively imagine promising future directions and features.
• Damon Poole from AccuRev (an SCM) will demo their tool in “advanced multi-stage continuous integration”
• Christian Gruber will demo Maven 2 & Continuum
• Owen Rogers and Sreekanth V will talk about CI in the context of Continuous Monitoring, with a touch of Lean (sounds interesting)
• Damon Poole and Joshua Sherwood invite you to “See Large Scale Multi-Stage Continuous Integration in Real Time”
• Graham Brooks will give tips in keeping build times down
• Ade Miller (from Microsoft, unexpectedly) will report about CI in a distributed environment and about the basic objections people have to CI
• Maciej Zawadzki from UrbanCode (I met him at CITCON Brussels; they do AntHillPro) will talk for 3 hours on the history, current state, and current practices of CI
• Fabrizio Cannizzo and Raghav Ramesh will be Pushing the boundaries of testing and CI, especially with regards to performance, scalability and robustness
• Usman Muzaffar from Electric Cloud (their CI tool is ElectricCommander) will debate validating against all target platforms/environments before check-in and running CI in “Better, stronger, faster continuous integration – Jump-starting the agile heartbeat”
• Fabrizio Cannizzo and Paul Moser will talk about usage and organizational impact of CI in their 50-strong team in “Evolution of the Tools and Practices to Achieve Organizational Change”
• Pramod Sadalage will talk about making database development part of CI (something I’ve been trying to promote in recent assignments) in “Managing Database Development on Distributed Teams”

Those are just the ones frontally addressing CI. Many others will mention it in their talks. Others too will talk about automated testing, a crucial aspect of CI. For example, I’d recommend:

• Joshua Graham’s talk about JTestMe, a tool that can run the tests that depend on the particular classes that have been checked in. This is one that I will not miss.
• Patrick Wilson-Welsh and Lisa Crispin talking about “Agile Automated Testing Strategies: Flipping the Testing Pyramid Right-Side-Up”

Cannot get enough Continuous Integration? Meet others enthusiasts at CITCON Amsterdam, October 3 & 4.

Update 25/07/2008: David Booth from JetBrains (the guys who do the CI tool TeamCity) told me that David Vydra in fact does not work for JetBrains. Fixed that. Sorry.