Continuous Integration and Gen

Continuous Integration (CI) is a practice often undertaken as part of agile development or extreme programming approaches where development team members frequently ‘integrate’ their work, often every few hours.

The requirement for code ‘integration’ most often results from the ability in most development approaches of allowing multiple developers to checkout the same source code and then rely on then ‘integrating’ their changes back into the master copy stored in a repository. It also typically results in an automated build process (and possibly also automated test) to ensure that the integrated changes are compatible with changes applied by other developers to the same or related source.

The objectives of CI are to improve the quality of software and reduce the time taken to deliver, especially by reducing or eliminating the costly and time-consuming integration tasks by ensuring that any integration issues are resolved early on and not as a massive exercise late on the development process.

Some of the technical issues that CI attempts to address are not applicable in a Gen environment. Only one person can checkout an object with modify access from a model and on upload, Gen ensures that at a basic level, the changes are consistent with the model, and so it is tempting to conclude that CI is not applicable in a Gen project.

However there are still several areas where CI concepts can be usefully applied.
The first relates to generated code and test environments. In our development environment, we generate code from the CSE into a shared development directory. In this way, every developer tests from the same code base and does not need to worry about maintaining their own private source code, object code or database. There are several other benefits of using server based code generation over local toolset generation, and perhaps this could be the subject of another post sometime…

It is important that the changes to the model, once uploaded, are correctly generated. We therefore use GuardIEn’s Upload Assistant to automatically perform the impact analysis and then generate the affected modules after each upload. In this way, the generate/build process ensures that the development code repository is kept up to date, and any errors are trapped at an early stage.

Another aspect of CI is ensuring that quality control is applied continuously. Numerous studies have shown that errors are far cheaper to fix if they are detected and fixed at an early stage in the life-cycle. We run about 25 checks on the objects changed automatically on upload using the integration between VerifIEr and the Upload Assistant. These checks detect common errors in the code (for example missing view matching or redundant code) and whilst the errors should be detected during testing, it is far easier and cheaper to correct the errors whilst the subset is still downloaded and before time has been wasted generating and testing the code.