What is continuous integration and how does it benefit our clients?

Expert post

Juan Ezquerro, System Administrator at PaynoPain

Continuous integration is a development practice whose name, as it is easily deduced, is descriptive and literal. To apply it, we rely on continuously verifying the code to be able to integrate improvements little by little or to update daily to obtain a much more reliable result in a shorter period of time. This allows us to better meet the goal timings, avoiding the pressure derived from last minute deliveries and offering higher quality results to our clients.

Another advantage of CI is found at the team members and individual levels. Since these practices are carried out in joint projects, the developers themselves are who will analyze the code, supporting each other. They themselves will have to learn different methods of integration and be forced to overcome day after day different errors or failures found in the code. This encourages communication between team members, and makes it much more enriching both individually and at the group or team level. And, as is logical, it also indirectly benefits the client, who enjoys a well-organized technical team and higher quality results.

How is continuous integration applied?

At all times there must be a test version or first phase to contrast the evolution of code in a way that makes it possible to detect errors in time and to be able to correct them. At the same time, each member of the team has access to the final version at all times.

An important factor to successfully use continuous integration is the monitoring of the most relevant metrics of our project, so its quality can be measured. This, in the long run, will lead to good code without the need for a change once it has been taken to the last phase, since it is optimized as it is built.

Of course, this process of frequent revisions and corrections are part of an automation that is developed to facilitate communication between the team and the evolution of the project. The continuous integration guarantees quality results and a correct operation of the project thanks to its continuous supervision and reduction of errors. This has an impact on better times and results for our clients, which is the main goal of each technical improvement that we implement in PaynoPain.