Following the integration test cycle

About this task

The integration test cycle includes the following:

During the integration builds, all of the newly completed tasks from developers are gathered and built. They are gathered based on the integration testing process rule used by the integration testing project hierarchy.

The software is likely to have problems at this point, and may not even build successfully. The goal is to find problems right away, not to get a high quality installation area. This is because of the unstable nature of the software at this point in development.

The kinds of problems you might see during integration-level builds include:

Remember that the integration build area is not a stable environment because it contains the most recently completed tasks. Another reason is that the candidates change frequently as developers complete their tasks. (This is normal.)

The integration test cycle be short and frequent; this will help you to find problems as early in the development cycle as possible. Additionally, developers with insulated development projects do not bring in each others’ changes until the tasks have passed integration testing.

The integration cycle works best if you can build and test every day, and make the newly tested tasks available to developers immediately after they pass testing.

Typically, the integration-level build cycle includes the following:

Procedure

  1. Developers continuously make changes and check them in by completing their tasks, without regard to the cycle. (The advantage is that the team is not interrupted or distracted by testing efforts.)
  2. The build manager updates, shows conflicts, resolves conflicts, builds the hierarchy, and creates a new installation area or media to be tested. (Part of this can be automated and done as a nightly job.)
  3. The build manager tests the resulting products with a short set of tests that verify that the product builds correctly and is usable. If defects are found, a member of the team creates tasks to fix the problems.
  4. If no severe defects are found, the application is ready for use, for example, as a development test area. Note that this may not happen every day; some days severe defects will be found, and some days the build may not even succeed.
  5. If the build manager finds no severe defects, he can continue by Creating a baseline. This makes the objects associated with the tasks in the baseline available to developers the next time they update their projects.

Results

Now that you understand what you will be doing during the integration test cycle and why you need to complete these operations, you are ready to perform the operations.


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