Unit-testing – Looking for statistics on automated testing, continuous integration and refactoring usage

Setting up a CI-engine is akin to setting up a fire alarm in a house.

In my mind the benefits do not correlate with many developers, but with a large code base. The CI-engine actively do all the boring work you do not want to do yourself, and do it everytime.

If you break a remote module which you haven't touched for a long time, you are told immediately. Not only compilation wise, but also functionwise if you have set up unit tests.

Also note that if you let you CI-engine do all the boring work, including setting up installers etc, you do not have to do it manually. You can just check in your source, and await the finished product being built in the standard location. (EDIT: The CI-engine also works in a well-defined environment, avoiding any developer specific setups, ensuring reproducibility)

This is also a part of quality assurance.

EDIT: After writing the above, I have had experience with the Maven build tool for Java. Essentially this allows us to keep the complete CI-configuration inside the project (with pom.xml) making it much simpler to maintain the CI-installation and/or migrate to another CI-engine.

First, having multiple builds per project in TeamCity is really the way to go. The nature of the platform makes it really easy -- the copy button is there for a reason.

In any case, when we were on SVN, we typically ran 2 builds for each project -- one pointed at the main development line (in our case the trunk) and one pointed at our release branch. We carried this build setup over to HG while following a branching model similar to this one . Only real challenge has been finding a new funk schwea about build numbers now that we could no longer use current SVN revision number.

We try and encourage folks to push relatively often, especially when there is lots of work going on at once and we wanted faster feedback cycles. Just because it is a DCVS doesn't mean you have to only push once a day or something.