Luis Atencio has posted the third part of his continuous delivery series (parts one and two), this time with a focus on continuous integration as a part of the process.

This is a continuation from my previous post and overall the series on Continuous Delivery. If you haven't been following, that's okay, every topic is self-contained, so read along. The contents of these posts are taken from the book titled "Continuous Delivery" by Humble and Farley (resources below) overlaid with my own professional experience. In this article, we talk a bit more about Continuous Integration (CI) and some practices developers should follow to ensure a smooth environment.

He talks some about what "continuous integration" is and how much it relies on an automation of the process around your delivery of software. He mentions integration of testing (unit/acceptance/integration) and how it can help discover issues early. He includes a list of essential practices that come along with the idea of CI integration including:

• Don't check in on a broken build
• Keep a stable build at all times
• Anticipate being able to revert your changes
• Using TDD
• Distributed Version Control

He also recommends using any downtime (like waiting on a build to "go green" again) to take a few minutes away from the code - it can benefit you and your code.