build

Articles

Branching example Picking the Right Branch-Merge Strategy

A good branch-merge strategy facilitates processes among multiple developers and is the basis for any well-functioning DevOps pipeline that uses continuous integration. Let’s explore branching strategies, merging strategies, and how you can put them together in a way that’s right for your team in order to bring quality features to production faster.

Alan Crouch's picture Alan Crouch
Icon showing an automated system Why You Need to Be Doing Continuous Integration

It’s usually easy and inexpensive to set up a continuous integration environment for either an agile or a waterfall project. Perhaps the most obvious benefit of CI is the elimination of the integration phase that existed in traditional waterfall projects, where we typically slip the worst on deadlines. But there are many other benefits to continuous integration that you may not have considered.

David Bernstein's picture David Bernstein
Infinity symbol Has Continuous Deployment Become a New Worst Practice?

Software development has been moving toward progressively smaller and faster development cycles, and continuous integration and continuous deployment are compressing delivery times even further. But is this actually good for businesses or their users? Just because you can deploy to production quickly and frequently, should you?

John Tyson's picture John Tyson
stacked containers Containers: A Tester's Friend or Foe?

Containers support the timely delivery of a quality software application. However, the change to a DevOps process involving containers will require testers to adapt to this new, more agile environment. What does that mean for testers and the work they do? Here's how testers can embrace these changes, containers, and DevOps.

Kevin Dunne's picture Kevin Dunne

Better Software Magazine Articles

Avoiding the Prioritization Trap

With incoming priorities being requested by just about everybody, how in the world can you and your team prioritize? Brandon shows you some innovative techniques that you can use to turn chaos into order.  One surprising approach is simply handling priorities on a first-in, first-out basis.

Brandon Carlson's picture Brandon Carlson
Configuration Management: The Ultimate Conductor in the Product Lifecycle

When you think of configuration management, build automation and version control usually come to mind. Dave presents a perspective that shows the important role CM plays in the entire product and project lifecycle.

Dave Lyon's picture Dave Lyon
Virtual Labs in the Cloud

Learn how to overcome infrastructure management challenges using virtual lab automation, and discover which cloudprivate, public, or hybridbest meets your organization's needs.

Ravi Gururaj
Continuous Integration—Your Project's Unlikely Hero

Code sandboxes of the world, unite behind a new leader: Continuous Integration (CI). Automated and customizable, CI gives you the ability to know at the push of a button whether your application is working or whether it needs a tweak. It brings together the disparate code of countless developers and provides a real-time gauge of your application's health. Never fear nightly (or, egads! weekly) builds again. Rely on the strength of CI.

Jeffrey Frederick

Interviews

Joe Townsend talks about configuration management How Configuration Management Is Changing: An Interview with Joe Townsend
Video

Joe Townsend has been working in the configuration management field for fifteen years and is a regular contributor to CMCrossroads. In this interview, Joe discusses how configuration management has changed over the years, the trouble with tools, and trends in IT.

Jonathan Vanian's picture Jonathan Vanian

Conference Presentations

STARCanada Logo Build Your Open Source Performance Testing Platform in the Cloud
Slideshow

Proprietary performance testing platforms can be complex, expensive, and difficult to scale. With the right approach, everything from continuous integration, to continuous deployment pipelines, to full-scale production loads can be supported, but a dizzying array of platforms, services...

Gopal Brugalette
Build the Right Product Right: Transitioning Test from Critiquing to Defining
Slideshow

Do you find yourself with limited influence over what gets shipped on products you test? Is your report card on product quality often ignored? Do you think you can contribute more? Join Gerard Meszaros as he describes ways to transition from approaching quality with brute force testing to...

Gerard Meszaros, FeedXL.com
Checking Performance along Your Build Pipeline
Slideshow

Do you consider the performance impact when adding a new JavaScript file, a single AJAX call, or a new database query to your app? Negligible, you say? I disagree―and so should you. Andreas Grabner demonstrates the severe impact small changes can have on performance and scalability.

Andreas Grabner, Compuware

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