Continuous Confidence in Software Development

The biggest challenge in today's Continuous Integration culture, is separating areas of concern and letting departments be autonomous and independent. What We find most often is that a Development organization adopts Continuous Integrationa and then starts to push their product and manner of releasing to the IT department. We need to start letting the IT organization be the professionals they are. This allows confidence to build across the teams and solidifies the organization as a whole. So how do we do this? Communication Listen to your teams. We need to recognize that Continuous Integration deals with the codebase. It is a practice to continuously integrate people's work with each other via continuously building and testing code. Development is responsible for the code. DevOps is responsible for building the assets that will be deployed, to the standard that IT expects. IT gets to determine what type of artifact they require to maintain the performance of he system. If t...

There are a lot of questions around legacy code. If we ask any developer who is new to the organization, they will most likely say: REFACTOR! Our first knee jerk reaction is to not touch the legacy code, so we kind of dismiss the new developer saying that. However, we should look more deeply at what they are saying. The Code is Messy Generally, when dealing with legacy code, it is messy! Let's face it, when we start writing code, we ignore certain design patterns for others because there isn't a need. Once we get large enough, something has to be done about it. We need to stay focussed. If we feel that we are assigning one senior developer to fix legacy code, while 50 others are still using it, we will,never fix the code. Continuous Confidence comes from looking at the code and feeling calm not erratic. The Code is Antiquated When we hear refactor, His might mean as well that the code doesn't follow today's standards. So how do we make it so? We need to refactor...

One of the hardest parts of Continuous Confidence is understanding what brings confidence to our testing. We strive, at times, to find that proper level of confidence. Too often, we talk about Code Coverage. We want to make sure that we are touching everything, and it lifts our confidence, falsely, to the same level of as our code coverage. If we have 60% code coverage, then we have 60% confidence. The issue, however, is after a while, we start to realize, once we get bugs, that we aren't really that confident in our code and then we dismiss testing almost as a chore instead of a tool. So how do we get more confidence? Well, the answer is simple, the process a little more difficult: write quality tests. Area Coverage The first thing we need to do, is understand what we are testing. We should be considering Area Coverage instead of Code Coverage. Area Coverage looks at the areas of the application that have tests. There aren't a whole lot of tools out there that will help yo...