When I started at my current employer five years ago the CI system consisted of an outdated Jenkins installation on a PC which was located under the desk of a developer. Builds were triggered three times a day, so a developer had to wait multiple hours after a commit until the feedback arrived. The builds couldn’t be reproduced locally, so debugging was at times done via console logging on the CI system.
Today the up-to-date Jenkins is hosted on failsafe servers by the IT department and a the hardware has grown to a master server with multiple build slaves. Each commit triggers a build pipeline which provides detailed feedback 5-20 minutes later. The whole system is monitored and the builds can be reproduced and debugged locally.
In this talk I’ll share how this change happened, the mistakes we made on the way and the successes we had. The topics include e.g.
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Collaboration between testers and developers on this topic
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Switching from Ant to Gradle
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Using Goomph to build RCP applications
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Speeding up tests
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Handling flaky tests
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Getting a hardware budget and why “measure twice, cut once” applied for us
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How building a bad solution can make the good one happen faster
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The effect of the improved build system on our product quality
I will end with an outlook into the things we have planned in the future
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Title change?
Submitted by Alexandra Schladebeck on Wed, 2019-07-03 04:05
Hi Tobias!
Thanks for the submission! I'd like to make a suggestion for a title change, maybe something like:
"Keeping your CI System up to date over many years"
"Open heart surgery: updating a running CI over multiple years"
What do you think?
Re: Title change?
Submitted by Tobias Geyer on Wed, 2019-07-03 07:12
I think you're right - the title needs work. I changed it and will think about it some more.
Re: Re: Title change?
Submitted by Alexandra Schladebeck on Thu, 2019-07-04 10:09
I like this one! :) QS for CI systems ;)
Testing :)
Submitted by Alexandra Schladebeck on Fri, 2019-07-05 04:24
Testing :)
Re: Testing :)
Submitted by Tobias Geyer on Fri, 2019-07-05 04:48
Testing is fun!