Continuous Integration Oriented Parallel And Distributed Construction Method Research

With traditional Waterfall and V model software development life cycle, system integration is nearly equal to previous phases-analysis, design and implementation, in terms of timeline and cost. The typical leading time of large software project is more than one year. This leaves some issues originating from analysis, design and implementation only to be found in the very late stage, say close to delivery deadline. Given the long time interval between the issue introduced and found, and different teams involved, investigating and fixing those issues mean heavy cost. And often leads to delay, sometimes, fail the project.As a result, agile development which is emphasis on short iteration and incremental develop mode, becomes more and more popular among large scale project-Ericsson, Nokia (now Nokia-Siemens), Alcatel-Lucent have been trying agile separately. But those large scale projects are facing a big problem specific to large scale projects-it’s rather tough to implement a CI (Continuous Integration) system which shall complete the build within several minutes (10minutes is a common sense), since the compilation usually takes hours to finish, not to say system integration, which is normally measured in hours to weeks.Known that the key point in building a CI system for large scale software project is to fill the computing power needs in build process, the paper first investigates the parallel and distributed computing capabilities of GNU make and distcc, and the results show8to9times speed-up in terms of elapsed time can be obtained during compilation phase, given about12tasks are running simultaneously. And combined with incremental compilation, presents a perfect solution to the compilation issue of CI. Next, the paper discusses how to design the test framework for proper distributed test according to the system architecture and set up a test cluster with the help of CI server, which well serves the computing power needs of integration test in CI system.With the technical impediments in implementing CI for large scale software project removed, the productivity of developer is improved; the integration leading time is shortened and the usage of project’s resource is optimized.