Achieving continuous integration excellence in Agile software development

Abstract

With the replacement of traditional software methodologies into Agile, It seems that there is a huge change in the industry than old days. Since Agile methodologies (AM) have gained widespread acceptance in the industry and it has left a considerable time period with its arrival and it seems that there are many practices, tools and technologies to have the best of agile. Continuous Integration (CI) is a recently emerged such practice which is used by industry experts in parallel with the agile by using a combination of several software categories. The objective of this study is to disclose whether CI tools and its best practices contribute to achieve excellence under the areas of communication, risk and the quality of AM in the context of Sri Lankan Software Companies. Survey based quantitative approach was conducted along with the questionnaire which is distributed among IT professionals in the industries which resulted in positive direction. Some CI best practices and ideal combination of tools have revealed that could make an impact on success in AM. The study revealed that there is a strong positive correlation between CI practices and quality of the Agile. Taking frequent build for every recent change, testing in a clone production environment, managing source code using a version control product, automating the deployment and build, making easy to get latest deliverables and test results, and maintaining logs to find failures are identified as prevailing best practices. Also when team sizes below 10 members, Agile have more possibility to reach excellence with quality, risk reduction and communication. According to recent studies and collected information it shows that tool usage associated with CI has increased and there are trends for new tools and use them as a combination with a proper integration.