Introducing Continuous Integration: A Success Story

In his book “The Clean Coder” Robert C. Martin tells several anecdotes from his professional live as a software developer to explain the attitude of a professional developer. That reminds me of a story when I started my current job.
It was around 2009 when I started to work in an organization with seven software development teams each with the size of approximately ten people. The teams delivered every two month new software versions which are then manually integrated to a running system on a medical device hardware. The integration took around additional four to six weeks. I couldn't believe that software was created with this “stone age” process. In the worst case the developers got feedback for their features from the fully integrated system only after three month. Oh my good, why do I started to work there? I talked to my boss about my concerns and he admitted that we have to change something. So I was appointed as a project manager. The core project team had two members: Matt, a very experienced software consultant and me.
We called the project “DailyBuild”. So our goal was to speed up the integration cycle time from ninety days to one. Yes, there where a lot of obstacles on our way. For example the teams used different source code control systems, we perceived the number of used build scripting tools as nearly infinite and the total software build time was about eight hours. Many problems we had to solve were related to the organizational structure of the development department. And of course if you want to change the way of working of people, a lot of them say: “Why should we change, we have always worked like this”. The only good thing was that I knew all the time that the project could not fail. I knew that the benefits would be overwhelming. The agile movement was already around several years and thousands of software teams had already adopted Continuous Integration.

After 4 month we had the first successful automated build including a simple smoke test of the integrated system on a virtual machine. It took some more weeks to finish things. Today, no one in the development department can imagine to work any more without the “DailyBuild” process in place. Yes we made it!