Going for the Next Step in Continuous Integration

Continuous integration 2.0.

That’s what Mike Maciag of Electric Cloud is calling it. The company’s CEO said preflight builds, with their ability to patch broken builds and development cycle stopgaps, is the next step for continuous integration.

“The reason we think about it as continuous integration 2.0 is it has all the benefits promised by continuous integration and it goes a long way to eliminating some of the issues,” Maciag said.

Electric Cloud said continuous integration problems arise if a developer puts code in and it breaks the build. The entire development team will be stopped because no one can check in until the problem is fixed.

Pre-flight builds, on the other hand, let a developer experiment with changes to a build without altering the source code. This can prevent production problems with a full production build cycle on source code before the developer checks the code into the development process.