Visual Studio - Continuous Integration
Rama Murari, Veerabhadraiah Sandru, Tata Consultancy, Services Limited, Deccan Park · 2013
Continuous Integration is a software development practice where members of a team integrate their work frequently, usually each person integrates at least once a day - leading to multiple integrations. The shift in the development models from waterfall to agile, the distributed environments, parallel development, frequent and rapid feedback, inspections, deployment and repeated automated testing encourages the organizations to adapt continuous integration. Continuous integration is a practice to be followed by the teams in addition to the usage of tools for automating the process. There are different tools for different elements of the continuous integration like build tools, test tools, code coverage tools, deployment tools etc. These tools are provided by different vendors. Organizations’ selection of CI tools becomes tedious as a careful selection of mix and match of the tools has to be done after thorough evaluation. Visual Studio provides a one stop shop for continuous integration implementation by having features to support all these needs of continuous integration. Organizations which have heavily invested in Microsoft technologies or moving towards it can look at Visual Studio for their CI needs. The tight integration of Microsoft technologies, tools and Visual Studio makes a valuable proposition for customers This paper provides the quick overview on the philosophy behind continuous integration and gives details of VS support for CI practice and deep dives into the various features of VS that will support CI implementation.