Continuous Integration: Fail Fast and Fail First

submited by
Style Pass
2021-06-16 10:30:04

By Sarah Gibson, Research Software Engineer at The Alan Turing Institute and Software Sustainability Institute Fellow, and Graham Lee, Research Software Engineer at the University of Oxford and Head Labrarian at Labrary

Sarah and Graham have different career backgrounds - Sarah having come through academia whereas Graham earned his stripes in industry. However in their current roles, they often find themselves using the same tools, for example Continuous Integration. They have written this blog post to identify how academia and industry may use Continuous Integration in different ways, and what they might learn from one another.

In Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD), the key concept is “continuous”. That is where it departs from what software engineering teams were doing before: rather than eventually integrating, at the end of developing a feature, we do it continuously, as we’re working. Instead of eventually deploying, when we’ve got a collection of features built and bugs fixed, we do it continuously.

The tools we use for these activities help us integrate and deploy continuously. Our pipelines give code authors and reviewers information about the quality of their submission, and its readiness to go into our products.

Leave a Comment