A Hundred Days of Continuous Integration

Many agile teams use Continuous Integration (CI). It is one of the Extreme Programming practices and has been broadly adopted by the community [1]. Just how effective is it? Does the effort of maintaining the CI server and fixing build breaks save time compared to a lengthier check-in process that attempts to never break the build? While much anecdotal evidence exists as to the benefits of CI there is very little in the way of data to support this. How do you convince teams and management that it’s worth adopting and how best to do it? This report outlines our experience with CI in a distributed team environment and attempts to answer these questions.