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Multi-Stage Continuous Integration


Self Integrity

When you as an individual are working on a change, you are often changing several files and a change in one file often requires a corresponding change in another file. While it may seem like a bit of a trivial case, you can think of this process as self-integration. The reason that you work on those files on your own instead of having several people work on it is because the tightly coupled nature of the changes requires a single person.

As an individual developer, there are two things that you do to shield yourself and others from instability. You make changes frequently, but you only check-in when you feel that your changes are integrated, tested, and won't disrupt other people.

Conversely, you only update your workspace when you are at a point that you feel you are ready to absorb other people's changes. Because other people only check-in when they feel the changes are ready and you only update when you feel you are ready, you are mostly shielded from the constant change that is going on all around you.

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Figure 1: A developer’s integration pattern.

This is the basis of multi-stage continuous integration: If individual isolation is a good idea, then isolation for features, teams, team integration, staging, QA and release is an even better idea.

Moving From Known Good to Known Good

The consumer portion of the developer integration pattern is also found in the way that customers interact with their software suppliers and the way that software producers interact with their third party software suppliers. Your customers don't want random builds that you create during development and you don't want random builds from third parties that you depend on. The reasons are simple and obvious. The level of quality of interim builds is unknown and the feature set is unknown. Your customers want something that has a high level of quality that has been verified to have that level of quality. Likewise, you want the same from your suppliers. Your suppliers include things like third party software libraries or third-party off-the-shelf software that your application depends on such as databases and web servers.

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Figure 2: Consumers at every level only take stable builds, aka "releases".

As with your own software, each third party that you rely on produces hundreds if not thousands of versions of their software, but they only release a small subset of them. If you took each of these as they were produced, it would be incredibly disruptive and you would have a hard time making progress on your own work. Instead, you move from a known good build to a known good build, their externally released versions. Your customers do the same.

This simple principle should be applied throughout your development process. Think of each individual developer as both a consumer and producer of product versions. Also think of them as a third party. Think of each team as well as each stage in your development process this way. That is, as a developer think of your teammates as customers of the work that you produce. Think of yourself as a customer of the work that they do. You want to move from known good version to known good version of everything you depend on.

It's All for One and One for All

The next level of coupling is at the team level.There are many reasons why a set of changes are tightly coupled, for instance there may be a large feature that can be worked on by more than one person. As a team works on a feature, each individual needs to integrate their changes with the changes made by the other people on their team. For the same reasons that an individual works in temporary isolation, it makes sense for teams to work in temporary isolation. When a team is in the process of integrating the work of its team members, it does not need to be disrupted by the changes from other teams and conversely, it would be better for the team not to disrupt other teams until they have integrated their own work. But just as is the case with the individual, there should be continuous integration at the team level, but then also between the team and the mainline.

So, how can we take advantage of the fact that some changes are at an individual level and others are at a team level while still practicing Continuous Integration? By implementing Multi-Stage Continuous Integration. Multi-Stage CI takes advantage of a basic unifying pattern of software development: software moves in stages from a state of immaturity to a state of maturity, and the work is broken down into logical units performed by interdependent teams that integrate the different parts together over time. What changes from shop to shop is the number of stages, the number and size of teams, and the structure of the team interdependencies

For Multi-Stage CI, each team gets its own branch. I know, you cringe at the thought of per-team branching and merging, but that's probably because you are thinking of branches that contain long-lived changes. We're not going to do that here.

There are two phases that the team goes through, and the idea is to go through each of them as rapidly as is practical. The first phase is the same as before. Each developer works on their own task. As they make changes, CI is done against that team's branch. If it succeeds, great. If it does not succeed, then that developer (possibly with help from her teammates) fixes the branch. When there is a problem, only that team is affected, not the whole development effort. This is similar to how stopping the line works in a modern lean manufacturing facility. If somebody on the line pulls the "stop the line" cord, it only affects a segment of the line, not the whole line.

On a frequent basis, the team will decide to go to the second phase: integration with the mainline. In this phase, the team does the same thing that an individual would do in the case of mainline development. The team's branch must have all changes from the mainline merged in (the equivalent of a workspace update), there must be a successful build and all tests must pass. Keep in mind that integrating with the mainline will be easier than usual because only pre-integrated features will be in it, not features-in process. Then, the team's changes are merged into the mainline which will trigger a build and test cycle on the mainline. If that passes, then the team goes back to the first phase where individual developers work on their own tasks. Otherwise, the team works on getting the mainline working again, just as though they were an individual working on mainline.

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Figure 3: Multi-Stage Continuous Integration.

This diagram shows a hierarchy of branches with changes flowing from top to bottom and in some cases back towards the top. Each box graphs the stability of a given branch in the hierarchy over time. At the top are individual users. They are making changes all day long. Sometimes their work areas build, sometimes they don't. Sometimes the tests pass, sometimes they don't. Their version of the software is going from stable to unstable on a very frequent basis, changing on the order of every few minutes. Hopefully, users only propagate their changes to the next level in the development hierarchy when the software builds for them and an appropriate amount of testing has been done. That happens on the order of once per hour or so, but ideally it happens no less than once per day.

Then, just as individuals check-in their changes when they are fully integrated, the team leader will integrate with the next level and when the integration build and test are done they will merge the team's changes to the next level. Thus, team members see each other's changes as needed, but only team member's changes. They see other team's changes only when the team is ready for them. This happens on the order of several times per week and perhaps even daily.

Changes propagate as rapidly as possible, stopping only when there is a problem. Ideally, changes make it to the main integration area just as frequently as when doing mainline development. The difference is that fewer problems make it all the way to the main integration area. Multi-Stage CI allows for a high degree of integration to occur in parallel while vastly reducing the scope of integration problems.


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