A short story about fish
About 6 months ago my team embarked on an initiative to upgrade our Continuous Integration (CI) & Automation pipeline. As an iOS team, the fact we already had a comprehensive suite of automated functional tests hooked up to Jenkins was impressive and gave us a solid foundation. However, our setup had started to creak at the seams. Inexplicable test failures, brittle tests, failing tests that miraculously worked if we gave them a swift kick in the nether regions and ran them again! We decided to evolve to a CI 2.0, which would be a lot more stable, massively reduce the amount of time we spent nursing our tests and ultimately give us better confidence in our system. We are not done yet but we have re-learned a number of basics along the way Lesson 1: with CI & automation, fast feedback is king Our monolithic test suites took hours to run. This discouraged developers from running them on every check-in, which is counter productive. Not running them means you increase the chan...