continuous integration

Countinuous integration is the last buzz word... keep reading it everywehre.

What is continuous integration
Continuous integration is a software development process, which ensures that bugs which have been detected earlier are not coming back into the code un-noticed.

It relies on a few principles:

• use of a version control: each time someone carries out a commit, a new build a done automatically in the background
• automatic build: as seen above, a build can be automatically triggered.
• automatic testing: the bug raised and fixed previously must have a matching unit test which will automatically test whether it is still fixed or not.

Continuous integration and PHP
A few tools can be useful to get started with "continuous integration".

• http://www.simpletest.org: Easier to use that PHPUnit, you can this software to implement and test your unit tests.
  
• http://phing.info/trac/: Tool to automate the build.
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Test Driven Development (TDD)
The idea behind TDD is to write the test before starting coding. The objective of the code should be to get the test passing.

This can be nicely applied to continuous integration: whenever a bug is raised:
1) Write the unit test for it, which currently fails
2) Write the fix.

The idea is that the tester could actually build the unit test**, so that the developer can still focus on development.

Note **:It is worth considering integration testing also, using selenium RC for instance.

launch48

Had a chat with Hugues last week and he mentioned an idea about a mobile app' -brought the idea to Launch48, pitched it, was voted in top 6, and without realising it find myself involved in quite a cool little project (has got potential though!), supported by a great team.

been captured on video by the lovely Hermione, presenting what the application is about... well I tried to anyway.



More about the actual team, and the project later.

contacts manager

Digital age allows us to have many friends, much more than we can deal with really. You can meet them on forumsn, through online connections, facebook, etc... and it is becoming increasingly hard to keep up with all these connections.

CRM tools (Customer Relationship Managament) have been around for a while. We now start seing what we could call FRM tools (Friend Relationship Management).

LinkedIn, Facebook can be used to keep an eye on what your "friends" are doing. But these online applications are also networking platforms, so not real "RFM" tools in my opinion.

Gist and Xobni are the real thing. These tools allows you to collect automatically information about your contacts, the way they are interconnected, the conversations you have with them thr0ugh many social channels, information about them on the internet, etc...

These are vey valuable tool, which I now use on a daily basis. They save you time, let you focus on other aspects of your business, and automate relationship management.