Monthly Archives: November 2014

Continuous Deployment: Introduction

This article is part of the Continuous Integration, Delivery and Deployment series.

Continuous deployment is the ultimate culmination of software craftsmanship. Our skills need to be on such a high level that we have a confidence to continuously and automatically deploy our software to production. It is the natural evolution of continuous integration and delivery. We usually start with continuous integration with software being built and tests executed on every commit to VCS. As we get better with the process we proceed towards continuous delivery with process and, especially tests, so well done that we have the confidence that any version of the software that passed all validation can be deployed to production. We can release the software any time we want with a click of a button. Continuous deployment is accomplished when we get rid of that button and deploy every “green” build to production.
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Continuous Delivery: Code Coverage

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This article is part of the Continuous Integration, Delivery and Deployment series.

In the previous article we explored unit tests as the first and fastest set of tests we should run. Now it’s time to see whether our unit tests provide enough code coverage.

Code Coverage

Unit tests by themselves do not provide enough confidence unless we know that they cover significant code coverage. Having all tests successful while, for example, covering only 15% of the code cannot provide enough trust.

Mature teams might not need to measure code coverage. They might know from experience that their unit tests are covering as much code as the project they’re working on needs. Teams like that tend to have years of practice with Test-driven development (TDD). However, for the majority of us, tools that measure the coverage are very indeed useful addition to our tool-belt.
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