Continuous Integration

This practice empowers teams to work together effectively. If Continuous Integration is in place, teams can spend the best part of their time and energy in creating new business value and still make Frequent Releases with minimal technical overhead.

This usually leads teams to automate the process of putting together a release, by writing their own build scripts using tools like Ant ( http://ant.apache.org/ ). Large projects can benefit from Cruise Control ( http://cruisecontrol.sourceforge.net ), which can run all the tests after a commit, and e-mail the results on failure to all interested parties.

Round-Trip Integration

Round-Trip Integration is the process of continuously: Transporting storytests written by customers to the development codebase Deploying production code and storytests in an executable form to a Staging Area.

Project customers are empowered to write and deploy storytests independently and thus aid the practice of Story Test-Driven Development.

Teams can set up systems whereby new storytests are checked in automatically to the code repository. When developers synchronize with the repository, they discover the new story tests, and proceed to build just enough functionality to make them pass. When they are done, they check their code back into the repository. All of the code is checked out and built automatically in a Staging Area on a continuous basis. The system is then deployed with the storytests in an executable form. At this point, anyone can execute the storytests on the latest version of the system to check its state.