Day 7: Run Your Tests Early And Often

In the first principle, we discussed the importance of having tests in order to validate your code and prevent bugs. In this principle, we explore how to apply those tests on a regular basis through continuous integration. Principle seven is modern applications must use continuous integration.

It might seem obvious and self-explanatory that modern applications use continuous integration. After all, building your project after each commit is the simplest way to run the tests and verify the application. But there are thousands of development shops that lack tests, continuous integration, or both. Why? Most of the time because it’s “too hard to set up” or “too expensive to run.” Neither is a good excuse, and both can be debunked.

Continuous integration can be relatively simple to set up. With GitHub releasing GitHub Actions, continuous integration and running your tests on every commit has never been easier. If you’re not using GitHub but using something like GitLab, you can use their built-in tools as well. And if you’re old school, Jenkins is a better-than-nothing solution you can set up and host on premises for your own purposes.

In terms of cost, there is often a cost associated with running continuous integration. However, this cost is minimal compared to the cost of releasing bugs into production or a broken component making it past QA because nobody ran the tests. It’s best to consider it part of the cost of doing business and accept the cost.

I want to make an important distinction here: continuous integration is not the same thing as continuous deployment. A successful application build does not need to be deployed to production to follow this principle; in fact, you can still have any release cycle you like. Some companies choose to release every build. Others choose to release one a week or every other day. Our sixth principle (yesterday) stated that applications should be deployed often, but deployment cadence is entirely up to you. What’s important is that you consistently build your application so that the tests are run and bugs are discovered early, and often.

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