Chapter 5. Trends and data from CI and deployment servers

 

This chapter covers

  • What can you learn from your CI systems, CT, and CD data alone
  • How to utilize your CI to get the richest data possible
  • How the addition of data from CI and deployment servers enhances and fills gaps in PTS and SCM data

Now that we’ve been through project tracking and source control, we’re moving to the next step, which is your CI system. In the scope of our application lifecycle, CI is highlighted in figure 5.1.

Figure 5.1. You are here: continuous integration in the application lifecycle.

Your CI server is where you build your code, run tests, and stage your final artifacts, and, in some cases, even deploy them. Where there are common workflows when it comes to task management and source control, CI tends to vary greatly from team to team. Depending on what you’re building, how you’re building it is the biggest variable at play here.

Before we dive into collecting data, we’ll talk about the elements of continuous development so you know what to look for and what you can utilize from your development process. If we revise the questions we asked in chapters 3 and 4 a bit, we get the types of who, what, and when shown in figure 5.2 through data from CI.

Figure 5.2. The hows from CI: the basic questions you can answer

Here are questions you can answer from your CI systems:

5.1. What is continuous development?

5.2. Preparing for analysis: generate the richest set of data you can

5.3. The data you’ll be working with: what you can get from your CI APIs

5.4. Key CI metrics: spotting trends in your data

5.5. Case study: measuring benefits of process change through CI data

5.6. Summary

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