Continuous Integration and Code Metrics

I mentioned in the lesson, continuous integration (CI) is one of out eight practices of an agile developer. It's really half of the core of the agile engineering practices, especially true for Extreme Programming. It not only verifies the integrity of the build artifacts but is also a regressive verification of the readiness of the build artifacts. We can make use of the CI server to produce a vast amount of code metrics as a barometer of the team's overall quality of work.

The link below is a very nice and concise article on code metrics, in which some plug-ins or tools are also introduced. I've been using some of them with Hudson CI and Sonar to keep track of the "hotspot" of the team (is it a pareto analysis? Or is it a reducing WIP action?). You are strongly encouraged to have a glance.

Using Code Metrics with Purpose
http://www.summa-tech.com/blog/2009/11/30/using-code-metrics-with-purpose/

Moreover, I really wanted to demonstrate my agile development environment in the lesson but in vain. Perhaps a better to do so is to make use of my YouTube channel in such a way that I'll upload a series of TDD / CI related video clips over there that can be shared with you.