I find I have a high barrier to writing – getting started is hard, if I write few things then I get obsessive about the quality of my writing.  I need to get back on the horse – and write a few short topics that can get me flowing.

I’m going to write about old topics – things that I talk about and teach on a daily basis, and get down in this journal the views that I hold right now.  I’m going to start with a favourite topic – Continuous Integration.

I’m a big advocate of Continuous Integration, but I regularly find myself having to explain the wider concept.  Lots of folk I find think of CI as the server itself (Hudson, CruiseControl etc.) which performs automated build processes and runs your automated test suite.  That’s a useful tool to achieve Continuous Integration, but it certainly doesn’t stop there.  I think of CI more as a holistic approach – one in which we seek accelerated feedback at any opportunity.

I’ll drill down into a few topics here, unfortunately all of these topics are linked together in some way, so hopefully this makes sense…

Disclaimer: I’m writing these entries to distill some of the conversations I have with customers on a regular basis – I hope it’ll help with my thinking and expression and provide some feedback.  None of this is original thought – it’s based on a few years of reading and listening to smart people.  I probably don’t remember where I heard a lot of this, so I won’t do a good job of attribution.