Sometimes, the easiest and most rewarding part of development is the actual coding. Managers and developers often dismiss the building, deploying, testing, and metrics gathering-aspects of the software lifecycle. Continuous integration (CI) is the concept of automating the build cycle so that code is built and tested many times during the day. This allows developers to integrate their code into the build daily or hourly thus, lowering the chances of integration problems.

This lecture will cover the key tools used for CI as well as some best practices. It will also show ways to take CI to an entirely different level with detailed metrics and reporting tools.

This lecture will also explain how to close the loop between software builds and deployments. The talk will explain how to create a framework that allows for environment independent builds that can be deployed anywhere.

Lastly, a case study will be presented of an in-house web based tool that has automated builds and deployments for 70+ applications and has saved hundreds of employee hours as well as 3 FTEs.

Franz Garsombke, an Architect at a large telecommunications company, has been developing and architecting enterprise software solutions for the last nine years, using Java for the past six years. He has worked in various industries including dot-com, B2B, telecommunication, healthcare, and large commercial retail.

Franz has been published in the Java Developer's Journal as well as the Software Quality Journal. He has spoken at the Denver Java User's Group and has also lectured at Oracle Open World. He has built everything from an e-commerce system that generates millions of dollars a day in revenue to a healthcare-based exchange that handles thousands of transactions between hospitals and their suppliers. His latest project has been an automated GUI based build and deployment system that manages 70+ applications. Franz is a huge proponent of open source code and frameworks.