Groovy and Grails Training in VA

You may have heard that Groovy was the fastest growing language of all times, attracting fans from around the world. OK, I made up the first part, but its true that bunch of cool people are coding lots of good stuff in Groovy these days. The language and process gurus Scott Davis and Andy Glover are teaching a 2-day Groovy and Grails course in Reston, VA. I wish I could attend as I am sure it will be informative and fun.

Agile 103: Continuous Integration and Agile Development

Compared to other disciplines, software engineering is still in its infancy and as such, it is undergoing significant transformations. This is a challenge because of the relentless innovation and ever changing standards; it is an opportunity because the low barriers of entry make it possible for virtually anyone with a computer to actively participate in the revolution and change course in significant ways.

Let’s take development methodologies for example. In the beginning of the century few people had heard of Agile development. Today, it is growing in popularity and adoption numbers suggest its value and effectiveness.

The Agile movement started largely out of necessity by looking at ways to increasing efficiency by reexamining the way people communicate and create software. The Agile model was explained as a collection of simple principles and practices. One of these practices is Continuous Integration (CI).

Continuous Integration (CI) is the practice of executing series of build steps in a scheduled or automated fashion. The build scripts may be run by a computer or a human; they can be automated or manual. The important thing is to run them often and provide the team with valuable feedback as soon as they need it.

CI can be defined as an umbrella practice enclosing sub-practices such as Continuous Builds, Continuous Database Integration, Continuous Unit Testing, Continuous Deployment, Continuous Functional Testing, Continuous Notifications, and Continuous Reporting. All of these are designed to shorten the time between the problem discovery and the solution. Agile teams can rely not only on the time-saving nature of automated builds, but also on the timely and accurate feedback. Depending on the CI configuration, when one of the steps fails the CI server may choose to continue or suspend further operation until the failure is taken care of.

The typical CI system starts with the compilation and packaging of the application. Any problems at this stage usually cause the CI cycle to fail and the system to notify the submitter or the entire team of the failure. Once the problems are fixed the CI server recompiles the source code and moves on to executing any Data Definition Language (DDL) and/or Data Manipulation Language (DML) scripts as part of the database integration step. This ensures the database gets synced with the source code and that any unit and functional tests that rely on the database changes execute properly. Depending on the server configuration unit test failures may or may not fail the CI cycle. If the application requires packaging and deployment, the CI server packages and deploys the archive into a container. After functional tests pass the CI server labels the source code with an automatically generated label. Finally, it generates a report of the integration cycle and notifies a list of recipients.

CI is an important practice for the Agile team. The CI system can provide feedback to all parties immediately after a problem is discovered. It can also generate valuable deployment artifacts and reports for various roles within the Agile team. Finally, the CI system brings teams closer to having the ability to plan faster and more frequent releases at the end of each iteration.