Tom Duckering: Coping with Big CI Systems
Details
Tom is interested in Continuous Integration (CI) when it gets big. In this session, he draws upon his experiences of helping large clients implement CI for complex systems and shares observations of the good, bad and ugly things he's seen. He'll present a series of real-world anti-patterns and propose some remedies and principles to avoid them.
CI is a core practice in building high-quality software. Since its inception, patterns of best practice have emerged, books have been written and a plethora of tools have been launched and improved. CI has not only been growing in maturity, but also in scope: taking responsibility beyond the build and test cycle. This growth into a key Continuous Delivery practice sees it addressing some of the 'last mile' problems along the path to production.
Simultaneously, the software being integrated has become increasingly complex and interdependent. We have moved from a state where CI was used for simple tasks on homogenous software programs to a world where CI performs difficult tasks on complex, fragmented, heterogenous systems. He will also look at how CI problems change from being predominantly technical to organisational as systems become bigger and more complex. He will demonstrate how these problems are frequently intertwined, unclear, and hard to resolve.
Topics will include things like: how to divide responsibility for build pipelines; CI skills as a specialism; CI frameworks; ways to tackle build-time dependency management; considerations in managing a heterogeneous build farm. He's sure he doesn't have all the answers but is keen to share the lessons that he's learnt the hard way.
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Tom Duckering: Coping with Big CI Systems