Continuous Integration (CI) is the practice of successfully smashing bits of code together to make a finished product.
That's it.
This means using version control to manage your bits. This means testing your application throughout development, as opposed to leaving it until the very end. (Or testing it on production. This means actually communicating with your teammates and the clients throughout the process.
Yes, yes, there are cool toys like Jenkins and Selenium and Mink and more serious must-learn skills such as PHPUnit and we will help demystify them for you. They all have their place. But Continuous Integration is an approach to development, an approach that we hope to get you excited about for the first time or all over again.
This talk is an overview of the practice of CI, how it does applies to Drupal, and why you can't properly deploy a site without it. We will talk you through all the requisites, the low hanging fruit, the cool toys to help you refine this process. We will do this all with an honest look at how we implement CI at Promet Source and the lessons we learned and the dead-ends we found along the way.
This is a talk for the technical and their bosses (especially the skeptical ones). Topics include:
- What is Continuous Integration?
- Why you must stop what you are doing right now and implement its practices.
- All the cool things you can do when those practices are in place.
- How you might go about implementing CI yourself. Right now.
- How you might refine and further tune your CI practice.
- What we are doing and how it made us developers and our sites so much better.
Come and be goaded and scolded (or get your managers to be) by:
Michelle Krejci, a Promet Source developer. She found Drupal in graduate school when searching for a solution for managing the work flow of her department's academic journal, sealing her fate. Michelle's first move after graduate school was to move from project owner to developer to get ideas into the zeitgeist fast. After some time working with sites in Support, she became passion about implementing continuous integration practices into Drupal development to heed off problems that arise in support before they start.
Allan Chappell, an experienced web developer from the SaaS (Software as a Service) world with specialties in Continuous Integration and Automated Testing. Allan has worked on a variety of architectures since he graduated from Devry University of Irving, Texas. He is a frequent participant and contributor in the Drupal Community, specifically with the Dallas Drupal Users Group. As a well-respected leader in the local Drupal community, Allan frequently teaches his techniques and methodologies to groups of Drupal leaders/users.
