Continuous Integration with Electric Cloud
Solving Continuous Integration Challenges for Enterprise Development
Continuous Integration (CI) is fast becoming standard practice in software development organizations. But when you’re talking about complex development environments — many developers, multiple projects, multiple platforms, etc. — Continuous Integration becomes difficult and resource-intensive to implement. For effective CI in an enterprise environment you'll need to ensure that your build system is:
- scalable (to support any size project, large number of users, workflow complexity, etc.)
- turnkey (not requiring creation/maintenance of extensive build scripts)
- automated (invoke builds with a single click)
- rapid (preferably less than 30 minutes for a complete build)
While open source "CI servers" are available, they fail to deliver on the above requirements in an enterprise setting.
Read about the challenges of enterprise Continuous Integration, and when to consider a move from open source to a commercial CI solution. Or view a demonstration of ElectricCommander and Perforce integrated to automate a seamless Continuous Integration process.
| Continuous Integration Challenge |
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Impact | |
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Electric Cloud Solution |
| Multiple CI servers across the organization | |
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Time spent on administration and maintenance; inability to share or reuse scripts | |
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Implement ElectricCommander as a single, centralized build service across the organization |
| Builds require manual intervention | |
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Integrating often will overwhelm a manual build process | |
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Automate the entire build and release process with ElectricCommander |
| Too many broken builds | |
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Broken integration builds can be a roadblock to Continuous Integration and discourage developers from checking in frequently | |
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Enable developer "preflight" builds and tests, across all platforms, before committing code to the integration branch |
| Slow build cycle (whether long individual builds or a large number of build targets) | |
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Long builds limit the number of iterations possible in a day | |
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Run jobs or individual steps in parallel across multiple servers to speed builds as much as 20x |
