Part 3. Smooth and polish it

Every business has room for improvement. Skyscrapers can be taller, cars can be faster—even grass can be greener. CI isn’t any different. There’s always room to do it better—an opportunity for smoothing and polishing.

In the last part of this book (chapters 9 through 12), you’ll squeeze even more from the CI process. You’ll extend it with automatically documentation generation, using the .NET XML documentation feature to build readable technical documentation right from the source code. We’ll continue the discussion with deployment and delivery techniques in CI. You’ll learn how to sleep well, knowing that your software is always ready to be deployed. We’ll look at continuous database integration. And in the last chapter, we’ll peek into high-scale CI setups.

CI can be extended ad absurdum. The key is, as usual, to maintain balance—to include everything you need and nothing else. You shouldn’t try to pack everything into the CI process: remember that you need the build feedback as soon as possible. The entire CI process should take less than 10 minutes, so choose wisely what you include. Leave the rest for regular nightly or weekly builds. In this section of the book, we’ll help you choose.