Thursday, August 16, 2007

Continuous Integration – Using integration queues

One of the long standing issues we had with our continuous integration project was the lack of any concurrency control when multiple projects were executing. Although there was some support for this through custom plug ins to ccnet it wasn’t integrated within the core code well i.e. you couldn’t easily see through cctray which projects were executing and which projects were pending, waiting on other projects to complete.

I managed to successfully integrate this new release with our project today which means for example when our unit test project is building, the core NET build project can no longer execute, which previously could cause all components to be removed whilst tests were running L. We have quite a few ccnet projects with a few dependencies so this is very useful. I’ve included the project dependencies in the diagram below




The dependencies shown in the diagram are not true UML dependencies, they simply show the project dependencies which trigger builds to occur i.e. if the Sprinter3.6.4 database project performs a new successful build, it will trigger the web app project to build.

If the diagram showed true UML dependencies then there would be a dependency between the NET assemblies project and the Sprinter3.6.4 database because the NET components depend on the schema of the database. However the NET code doesn’t need to be re built if the database changes, only component or web application unit tests should be re-executed.

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