Automated Continuous Integration of Component-Based Software: An Industrial Experience

When a software product is composed of dozens of or even hundreds of components with complicated dependency relationship among each other, one component's change can affect lots of other components' behavior. Sometimes, therefore, the stabilization job with multiple updated components drives the people who are responsible for integration and release the software into an integration hell. To avoid this kind of integration hell, we established integration procedure which encourages the developers frequent and small releases. We also created an automated integration system which continuously runs integration process in an incremental way so as to create and maintain an up-to-minute reasonably stable version of the product release candidate. In this paper, we introduce our integration procedure and automated integration system for a software product with hundreds of components, and a few lessons learned from the implementing and applying the system as well.