The Importance of Being Able to Build Locally
A little while back I wrote an article describing how to do continuous integration . But I left out one important step that happens before any code even enters the CI pipeline. A step so important, so fundamental, so obvious that you don’t realise it is there until it is missing. You must be able to build and test your software locally, on your developer machine. And by “test” I don’t just mean unit test level, but acceptance tests as well. I said it was obvious. But once in a while I do stumble across a project where this rule has been missed, and it leads to a world of unnecessary pain and discomfort for the team. So what happens when you cannot easily build and test anywhere apart from the pipeline? Without being able to run tests locally, the development team is effectively coding blind. They cannot know whether the code they are writing is correct. Depending on where the dysfunction is - compile, unit test or acceptance test stage - the code checked in may or m...