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Continuous integration: it’s not just about tests

Most people value continuous integration as the ability to run unit and integration test suites whenever a developer makes a change. For sure it has a lot of merits, but a continuous integration setup provides some benefits way beyond that.

We recently set-up a Bamboo CI server instance for IzPack, thanks to Codehaus, Atlassian and the anonymous company that gave a server to Codehaus for the purpose.

Quite often, continuous integration allowed us to be instantly notified of issues we would have spoted much later otherwise:

1. files that were not put under version control (one developer can easily forget that!)
2. use of Java 6 features while we target Java 5 compliance.

I'm sure you can get other examples as well, but the point is clearly that a properly configured CI server helps you spot issues way beyond just failing test cases, as it should be rather viewed as a constrained, automatic, developer agnostic build environment.

Related posts:

1. IzPack / Sun IPS integration article
2. IzPack 4.3.0-rc1 available for testing purposes
3. A few updates from the current roadmap
4. New IzPack-based installers for GlassFish
5. Discover LightHTTPD