What are the best practices of Continuous Integration (CI)?

 Some of the best practices of Continuous Integration (CI) are as follows:

1. Build Automation :

In CI, we create such a build environment that even with one command build can be triggered. This automation is done all the way up to deployment to Production environment.

 

2. Main Code Repository : 

In CI, we maintain a main branch in code repository that stores all the Production
ready code. This is the branch that we can deploy to Production any time.

 

3. Self-testing build :

Every build in CI should be self-tested. It means with every build there is a set of tests that runs to ensure that changes are of high quality.

 

4. Every day commits to baseline : 

Developers will commit all of theirs changes to baseline everyday. This ensures that there is no big pileup of code waiting for integration with the main repository for a long time.
 

5. Build every commit to baseline : 

With Automated Continuous Integration, every time a commit is made into baseline, a build is triggered. This helps in confirming that every change integrates correctly.
 

6. Fast Build Process : 

One of the requirements of CI is to keep the build process fast so that we can quickly identify any problem.
 

7. Production like environment testing : 

In CI, we maintain a production like environment also known as pre-production or staging environment, which is very close to Production environment. We perform testing in this environment to check for any integration issues.
 

8. Publish Build Results : 

We publish build results on a common site so that everyone can see these and take corrective actions.
 

9. Deployment Automation : 

The deployment process is automated to the extent that in a build process we can add the step of deploying the code to a test environment. On this test environment all the stakeholders can access and test the latest delivery.