Continuous Delivery – Structuring Code and Builds for Multiple Applications in a Small Team

continuous integrationcontinuous-deliverymsbuildteam-foundation-serverversion control

Background:

3-5 developers supporting (and building new) internal applications for a non-software company. We use TFS although I don't think that matters much for my question.

I want to be able to develop a deployment pipeline and adopt continuous integration / deployment techniques.

Here's what our source tree looks like right now. We use a single TFS Team Project.

$/MAIN/src/
$/MAIN/src/ApplicationA/VSSOlution.sln
$/MAIN/src/ApplicationA/ApplicationAProject1.csproj
$/MAIN/src/ApplicationA/ApplicationAProject2.csproj
$/MAIN/src/ApplicationB/...
$/MAIN/src/ApplicationC
$/MAIN/src/SharedInfrastructureA
$/MAIN/src/SharedInfrastructureB

My Goal (a pretty typical promotion pipeline)

  1. When a code change is made to a given application I want to be able to build that application and auto-deploy that change to a DEV server.

    • I may also need to build dependencies on Shared Infrastructure Components.
    • I often also have some database scripts or changes as well

  2. If developer testing passes I want to have an manually triggered but automated deploy of that build on a STAGING server where end-users will review new functionality.

  3. Once it's approved by end users I want to a manually triggered auto-deploy to production

Question:

How can I best adopt continuous deployment techniques in a multi-application environment? A lot of the advice I see is more single-application-specific, how is that best applied to multiple applications?

  • For step 1, do I simply setup a separate Team Build for each application?

  • What's the best approach to accomplishing steps 2 and 3 of promoting latest build to new environments?

  • I've seen this work well with web apps but what about database changes

Best Answer

I think Jenkins CI should help you to achieve what you want.

  • You can also manage dependencies between different applications using pre/post build action plugins of Jenkins.
  • Build Pipeline plugin should help you to manage the pipeline. The latest plugin allows "retry" which should help you to quickly revert back to the previous builds if you want to.
  • I've not used TFS myself, but looks like Jenkins has TFS plugin available.

About the database migrations, versioning DB should be done, in that way you can deploy a migration scripts along with the deployment.

Jenkins + Build Pipeline has been working well for me for a long time. Those were mainly small/medium complex web applications. I've tried it for small iOS and Android apps too.

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