Continuous Integration as a Development Team’s Way of Life
Continuous integration (CI) is a buzzword in software development today. We know it means “run lots of builds,” but having a continuous integration pipeline opens up opportunities well beyond making sure your team's code compiles. What if this pipeline could improve everything from the quality of code reviews to how often and safely you deploy to production and how you monitor your product in the wild? What if CI could provide insights into how automated tests are performing and how to improve them? Melissa Benua describes how to set up a basic CI infrastructure and then transform it into a way of life for development and test teams. Using free or nearly free tools, Melissa walks through a practical approach to making sure your code works—all the time and at every stage of the release train. Come away with practical advice for creating builds and running automation on the fly without spending hundreds of hours or thousands of dollars.
In her career Melissa Benua has worked in nearly every software development role—engineer, test, DevOps, and program management—and now senior backend engineer for PlayFab. Melissa has created and run high-availability, high-quality services at Boeing and Microsoft on products such as Bing, Cortana, and Xbox One. Melissa discovered her love of massively-scaled systems while working on the Bing backend, where she honed the art of keeping highly-available complex systems up while undergoing massive code churn. Melissa isn’t afraid to mix traditional approaches with bold new ideas to make her products better, faster, and more reliable. She’s passionate about maximizing efficiency in her product code and in her developer tools, and about sharing best practices.