Chapter 4. Continuous Integration

When building software, quality assessment is something that usually is pushed toward the end of the life cycle, just before the release. When the team is working in a 6-months release cycle, the drawbacks are not as obvious as when the release cycle is just a few days old (or even hours!), but from my experience, I can tell you that getting early feedback in your software is crucial in order to raise the quality to a good level we are comfortable to live with.

There is a misconception in the software that puts the average software project in danger: the software has to be perfect. This is totally incorrect. Think about some of these real-world systems: the engine of your car, a nuclear plant, the water purification system in major cities, and so on; human lives depend upon all of them and they fail. A fair amount of money is spent on these systems without being able to ensure the total safety, so what makes you think that the software that your company writes...