Introducing CI at a large organization - Practices, tools and lessons learned

Spreker: Frank Scholten

Abstract

Continuous integration is common practice in modern software development that allows software developers to smoothly build, test and distribute their software. In this day and age many organizations use CI tools and principles. However there are legacy systems out there that don't (fully) adopt them. In talk I discuss how we introduced CI in a large organization that develops many software projects in-house. During this project we built a 'common build' platform that helped developers to quickly build, test and release their code and have it analyzed by SonarQube. In this project we migrated code from CVS to SVN and from Ant to Maven and we helped developers make the transition to use CI tooling and practices. We used Puppet to provision Jenkins instances and test servers and developed useful scripts and tooling we used during the migration process. During this talk I will show what we did and what we learned along the way.

Prerequisite knowledge

Presentation outline

• Background on the project
• Migrating code, tips and tricks
• Project management tips
• Provisioning Jenkins with Puppet
• Lessons learned
• Improving the 'common build' system

Biografie

I am Frank Scholten, software developer at Trifork Amsterdam, working on application development, automation and systems integration. I like to automate things and build tools that do the work for me. As a result I am interested in machine learning topics such as text clustering and have contributed to the Apache Mahout and Apache Whirr projects. Another topic I am interesting in that involves automation is the DevOps idea of 'infrastructure as code'. This last year I have been exploring Puppet and other DevOps concepts and tools when building a common build platform at a large organization.