Executive summary

— Continuous integration systems are a vital part of any Agile

team because they help enforce the ideals of Agile
development
— Jenkins, a continuous build tool, enables teams to focus on
their work by automating the build, artifact management,
and deployment processes
— Jenkins’ core functionality and flexibility allow it to fit in a
variety of environments and can help streamline the
development process for all stakeholders involved
Agenda
— Continuous Integration (CI)
— What is it?
— What are the benefits?
— Continuous Build Systems
— Jenkins
— What is it?
— Where does it fit in?
— Why should I use it?
— What can it do?
— How does it work?
— Where is it used?
— How can I get started?
— Putting it all together
— Conclusion
— References
CI - Defined
— “Continuous Integration is a software development practice
where members of a team integrate their work frequently,
usually each person integrates at least daily - leading to
multiple integrations per day. Each integration is verified by
an automated build (including test) to detect integration
errors as quickly as possible” – Martin Fowler
CI – What does it really mean?
— At a regular frequency (ideally at every commit), the system
is:
— Integrated
— All changes up until that point are combined into the project
— Built
— The code is compiled into an executable or package
— Tested
— Automated test suites are run
— Archived
— Versioned and stored so it can be distributed as is, if desired
— Deployed
— Loaded onto a system where the developers can interact with it
 CI - Workflow

Code Regular Continuous Artifact

Repository Interval Build System Executable/
Repository

Package

Testing Results
Source & Tests

Test
Reports
Deployment

Developers
CI – Benefits
— Immediate bug detection
— No integration step in the lifecycle
— A deployable system at any given point
— Record of evolution of the project
CI – The tools
— Code Repositories
— SVN, Mercurial, Git
— Continuous Build Systems
— Jenkins, Bamboo, Cruise Control
— Test Frameworks
— JUnit,Cucumber, CppUnit
— Artifact Repositories
— Nexus, Artifactory, Archiva
Jenkins
— Branched from Hudson
— Java based Continuous Build System
— Runs in servlet container
— Glassfish, Tomcat
— Supported by over 400 plugins
— SCM, Testing, Notifications, Reporting,
Artifact Saving, Triggers, External
Integration
— Under development since 2005
— http://jenkins-ci.org/
Jenkins - History
— 2005 - Hudson was first release by Kohsuke Kawaguchi of
Sun Microsystems
— 2010 – Oracle bought Sun Microsystems
— Due to a naming dispute, Hudson was renamed to Jenkins
— Oracle continued development of Hudson (as a branch of the
original)
 Jenkins – Fitting in

Code Regular Artifact

Repository Interval Executable/ Repository
Package

Testing Results
Source & Tests

Test
Reports
Deployment

Developers
Why Jenkins? Flexibility!
— Jenkins is a highly configurable system by itself
— The additional community developed plugins provide even
more flexibility
— By combining Jenkins with Ant, Gradle, or other Build
Automation tools, the possibilities are limitless
Why Jenkins? Award winning!
— InfoWorld Bossies Award, 2011

— O'Reilly Open-Source Award, 2011

— ALM&SCM, SDTimes 100, 2010, 2011

— GlassFish Community Innovation Award 2008

— Duke's Choice Award 2008

Why Jenkins? Free/OSS
— Jenkins is released under the MIT License
— There is a large support community and thorough
documentation
— It’s easy to write plugins
— Think something is wrong with it? You can fix it!
What can Jenkins do?
— Generate test reports
— Integrate with many different Version Control Systems
— Push to various artifact repositories
— Deploys directly to production or test environments
— Notify stakeholders of build status
— …and much more
How Jenkins works - Setup
— When setting up a project in Jenkins, out of the box you have
the following general options:
— Associating with a version control server
— Triggering builds
— Polling, Periodic, Building based on other projects
— Execution of shell scripts, bash scripts, Ant targets, and Maven
targets
— Artifact archival
— Publish JUnit test results and Javadocs
— Email notifications
— As stated earlier, plugins expand the functionality even
further
How Jenkins works - Building
— Once a project is successfully created in Jenkins, all future
builds are automatic
— Building
— Jenkins executes the build in an executer
— By default, Jenkins gives one executer per core on the build server
— Jenkins also has the concept of slave build servers
— Useful for building on different architectures
— Distribution of load
How Jenkins works - Reporting
— Jenkins comes with basic reporting features
— Keeping track of build status
— Last success and failure
— “Weather” – Build trend

— These can be greatly enhanced with the use of pre-build

plugins
— Unit test coverage
— Test result trending
— Findbugs, Checkstyle, PMD
Jenkins by example – Main Page

— The main page provides a summary of the projects

— Quick view of
— What’s building (“No builds in the queue”)
— Build Executor Status (both “Idle”)
— Status of the projects
Jenkins by example – Project Status
— Project status pages provide more details about a given
project
— The status of the last several builds
— Charting (depending on plugins)
— Dependencies
Jenkins by example – Project Status
Jenkins by example – New Project
Enhancing Jenkins
— Jenkins plugin system can enable a wide range of features including (but certainly not
limited to)
— SCM
— Mercurial, Git, Subversion
— Testing
— Selenium, Windmill, TestLink
— Notifications
— IRC, Twitter, Jabber
— Reporting
— Doxygen, PMD, Findbugs
— Artifact Saving
— Artifactory, Amazon S3, SCP
— Triggers
— Jabber, Directory Watchers
— External Integration
— GitHub, Bugzilla, JIRA
— And most importantly – The CI Game
— A points based game where developers compete against each other to develop the most stable, well-
tested code
Who uses Jenkins?
Running Jenkins yourself
— Jenkins is packaged as a WAR, so you can drop it into whichever servlet
container you prefer to use
— Jenkins comes pre-packaged with a servlet if you just want a light-
weight implementation
— Native/Supported packages exist for
— Windows
— Ubuntu/Debian
— Redhat/Fedora/CentOS
— Mac OSX
— openSUSE
— FreeBSD
— OpenBSD
— Solaris/OpenIndiana
— Gentoo
Running Jenkins yourself – Updates
— Jenkins has two release lines
— Standard releases
— Weekly bug fixes and features
— Long-Term Support releases
— Updates about every 3 months
— Uses a “Stable but older” version from the standard release line
— Changes are limited to backported, well-tested modifications
Letting someone else run Jenkins
— There are also cloud-based solutions that can provide a
Jenkins instance
— Cloudbees - http://www.cloudbees.com/
— ShiningPanda - https://www.shiningpanda.com/
Tying it into Agile
— For an Agile team, Jenkins provides everything needed for a
robust continuous build system
— Jenkins supports Agile principles by constantly providing
access to working copies of software
— Jenkins’ extensibility allows the system to adapt to many
different pre-existing environments
Putting it all together
— While an integral part of a CI system, Jenkins is by no means
the only component
— In order for a CI system to function, a common repository
for the codebase needs to exist
— A database of artifacts needs to exist, so deliveries can be
made at past iterations
— The last step in a CI process is the deployment of the
components built
— …and none of this matters if the developers don’t use the
system; procedures need to ensure the system is used as
intended
Conclusion
— Continuous integration is a necessity on complex projects
due to the benefits it provides regarding early detection of
problems
— A good continuous build system should be flexible enough to
fit into pre-existing development environments and provide
all the features a team expects from such a system
— Jenkins, a continuous build system, can be an integral part of
any continuous integration system due to it’s core feature set
and extensibility through a plugin system
References
— Continuous Integration – Martin Fowler
— http://www.martinfowler.com/articles/continuousIntegration.html
— Hudson
— http://hudson-ci.org/
— Hudson Continuous Integration Server
— http://www.code-magazine.com/articleprint.aspx?quickid=0906071&printmode=true
— The Hudson Book
— http://www.eclipse.org/hudson/the-hudson-book/book-hudson.pdf
— Jenkins
— https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org
— Monkey Image
— http://corrines-corner2006.blogspot.com/2011/09/freebie-monday_26.html
— What is Continuous Integration
— http://confluence.public.thoughtworks.org/display/CCNET/What+is+Continuous
+Integration