Introduction to Multi-Stage Continuous Integration

A full, continuous integration build and test is a key component of most agile processes. Unfortunately, as systems grow in size through consecutive iterations, these builds can easily take thirty minutes or more. Before you finish the build, other people's check-ins will invalidate your continuous integration (CI) results. Multi-stage CI solves this problem by limiting project-wide churn and allowing CI to scale to large projects. With Multi-Stage CI, each team does a team-based CI first and then cross-integrates the team's changes into the mainline code base. Damon Poole introduces the Multi-Stage CI process, discusses its benefits, presents examples of how to implement and automate it in both local and distributed environments. Join Damon as he shows how to avoid pitfalls, such as increased merging overhead and unnecessary integration delays, and describes how to include a variety of stages such as multi-team integration, QA, code reviews, and more.