Continiuous integration, a best practise report?

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Continiuous integration, a best practise report?

Written by Wilco Jansen Tuesday, 29 September 2009 14:10

Recently I have been interviewed by a Dutch journalist who pointed me to the "Coverity Scan Open Source Report". His question was why Joomla was not amongst the open source projects in that report. I will not bother you with the interview, but the report itself holds some very interesting information regarding quality of the products and with that the quality of the development of those open source projects.

In the executive summary the following remarks can be found:

The overall integrity, quality, and security of open source software is improving.
Open Source developers are actively improving software.
Most common defect types are holding steady.
Longer functions have lower defect densities, contrary to common belief.

In addition to these findings they notice significant shifts in open source adoption and quality worth noting:

Coverity Scan was launched in conjunction with the United States Department of Homeland Security to improve the quality and security of the most widely used software in the world; it has evolved to become the standard for analyzing and improving the quality, performance, and security of open source.
Gartner estimates that by 2012, 80% of all commercial software will include elements of open source technology.
The Coverity Scan rungs have become a way to identify the highest-quality, defect-free open source software.

Note: The author of the report contacted me. The reason why PHP projects are not included is because they do not have the static analytics software for PHP implemented (yet).

The findings are most intriguing to me, especially the first two findings in the management summary state that quality of the individual projects is improving and open source developers are actively improving the software. Especially the chapter "Projects with Most Improved Quality and How It Was Achieved" reveals how these projects have been able to improve quality. As I already stated in my article series about continuous integration the report also mentions the following:

The projects that have been most successful generally have one or two “champions” who keep code integrity at the top of their minds, review analysis results, and prod and remind other developers to take advantage of the analysis results. In some projects, these champions direct others to fix the code defects; in other cases they also work on fixes personally. In addition to promoting the use of static analysis, these champions employ a full range of best practice techniques for developing high-integrity software, including:

Nightly builds,
Continuous integration,
Unit tests, and
Regression tests.

When I created the bug squad this was exactly what I envisioned as the quality measurements to implement. The bug squad is the group that has the code integrity at the top of their mind, it works along a two stage quality gateway system. The first level is the mechanism to test patches before they get committed, the second level are the maintainers who do a code review before the actual code is committed to the trunk. Within the 1.5 development cycle this already has proven to be a mechanism increasing quality substantially, but the problems with code integration have not been solved because of this. We still see code being committed that breaks other parts of the CMS, and that is exactly one of the problems you will solve with a continuous build strategy.

There has been an attempt to get Unit testing in place within Joomla and there are thoughts on implementing continuous integration. As I pointed out in my blog series about continuous integration, there is considerable time and effort needed to get this in place for Joomla (to get a feeling on what I mean you should read the "Continuous Integration in PHP; a closer look at coding standard" article). In my opinion it is a basic requirement in the end to bring the Joomla code-base to a higher quality standard.

Would be interesting to see if people are interested in working on this specific part for the Joomla project...feel free to contact me if you do at jansen dot wilco at gmail.com or just leave a note here.

About the author Wilco Jansen

Wilco was born in 1967 in the Netherlands where he still lives. After years of being a programmer Wilco has worked as project manager and IT manager. Discovered Joomla! when he was creating his own content management system, and never lost focus after then. Joined core team as development coordinator in May 2006 just helping to make Joomla! even better then it is already. Wilco has been deeply involved in the Joomla project as Google summer of code program manager 2006, 2007 and 2008 editions, co-organizer of the Google Highly Participation contest in 2008, first ever development coordinator, creator of the Joomla bug squad, member of the board of Open source matters, regular speaker on world wide conference advocating Joomla and much, much more. Wilco has a bachelor degree in business and information engineering and studied Master of Science knowledge and information engineering at the Middlesex University in London.

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