Continuous Integration (CI) is the practice of successfully smashing bits of code together to make a finished product.
That's it.
This means using version control to manage your bits. This means testing your application throughout development, as opposed to leaving it until the very end. (Or testing it on production. This means actually communicating with your teammates and the clients throughout the process.
Yes, yes, there are cool toys like Jenkins and Selenium and Mink and more serious must-learn skills such as PHPUnit and I will help demystify them for you. They all have their place. But Continuous Integration is an approach to development, an approach that we hope to get you excited about for the first time or all over again.
This talk is an overview of the practice of CI, how it does applies to Drupal, and why you can't properly deploy a site without it. I will talk you through all the requisites, the low hanging fruit, the cool toys to help you refine this process. We will do this all with an honest look at how we implement CI at Promet Source and the lessons we learned and the dead-ends we found along the way.
This is a talk for the technical and their bosses (especially the skeptical ones). Topics include:
What is Continuous Integration?
Why you must stop what you are doing right now and implement its practices.
All the cool things you can do when those practices are in place.
How you might go about implementing CI yourself. Right now.
How you might refine and further tune your CI practice.
What we are doing with BeHat, Travis CI and how it made us developers and our sites so much better.
