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Reviewer: Robert M. Lynch

As part of the “Addison-Wesley Signature Series,” this book provides system developers with a prescription for integrating development ventures on a periodic, usually daily, basis. The text describes continuous integration (CI) practices and techniques to improve the development process. The presentation is divided into two parts: “Principles and Practices of CI” and “Creating a Full-Featured CI.” The first part provides a CI background based on Martin Fowler’s original papers. Furthermore, risk management and software builds are discussed at length. The second part provides a prescription for the development process. This includes mechanisms for testing, inspection, deployment, and feedback. The material is helpful in making integration a nonevent in development projects. Practices and techniques for using CI effectively with teams, and reducing repetitive processes in software builds, are described. Assessments of different CI servers are also provided. Two appendices are included, and are very useful. The first provides a range of resources, largely available on the Web, that discuss scripting, version control, databases, testing, inspection, deployment, documentation, and feedback information critical to CI. The second examines CI tools for build schedulers and automated builds. The book is well written and contains numerous examples. It is easy to read, and the material is presented sequentially. Necessary definitions are provided throughout the text. The index is complete and helpful to the reader. This software engineering book is designed for project managers and others overseeing medium to large-scale software development initiatives. Online Computing Reviews Service