Continuous Integration and Creating an Effective Development Process

Continuous Integration and Creating an Effective Development Process 4.2 http://spkr8.com/t/8781

Gaetan Savoie 4.2

Senior Consultant at SwiftRadius
1 talk

Description:

This is a joint presentation from Jason Row and Gaetan Savoie on how Continuous Integration has been applied on recent projects. Gaetan will talk about CI with Hudson/Jenkins and how he used Powershell and MSBuild to push his code to a staging platform on Azure. Jason spent his summer months working on a 3 month contract where he joined a development team on a project that had been underway for a year. He'll talk about how CI was one part of the system that made it easy for him to contribute right away. He'll also discuss a few other technologies/methodologies that he encountered such as: Nant, MVVM, Event Aggregator pattern, and aspect-oriented programming.

Links: Website | Slides

Comments on this Talk

Gerard Gallant, 20 Oct 06:06 PM

Hi,

The content and delivery at last night's meeting was good.

The only thing I would recommend is the same thing I struggle with when public speaking...volume.

It was difficult to hear you but besides that the talk was good.

Thank you for doing the presentation!

Gerard

Gaetan Savoie, 21 Oct 12:28 AM

Thanks Gerard, I'll work on that. Really appreciate the feedback! Gaetan

Kevin Phillips, 21 Oct 02:01 AM

Let me preface my comment by saying this was my first attendance at a group meeting such as this so I have limited background for comparison.

I agree with Gerard on the loudness aspect. It was a bit difficult to hear what you were saying.

As for the content, I found it hard to find useful material to take away from your presentation. It was interesting to see that the technologies you were working with were the same as other companies / projects in the industry but I personally would have found it easier to take part in the discussion had the content been more generalized or abstracted in some way. This would have allowed me to find similarities between how your project related to the projects I've worked on. By focusing on specific code samples I found it harder to relate.

Some of this perception was undoubtedly influenced by my initial expectations for the topics as they were highlighted online. I had anticipated hearing information about the kinds of strengths and weaknesses you saw with the different tools you use, or maybe to hear about why you chose those particular tools over other tools. Or maybe a more focused example of a particularly difficult continuous integration problem that you solved in some novel way that may be generalized for other situations.

Also, since I have a rather extensive background in infrastructure management and related technologies I was somewhat hoping to see some more advanced topic covered such as distributed builds, artifact management, dependency management and other such things. That being said maybe that would have been too much for the majority of the attendees. I'm not sure.

I realize it is difficult to choose topics and content that are applicable to such a wide assortment of people with varied backgrounds. I personally was just hoping for / expecting something different.

Gaetan Savoie, 21 Oct 09:52 AM

Thanks for feedback Kevin, I will pass it to the committee. You brought up some good points that will help the group for future presentation.