Continuous Integration

Continuous Integration (CI) is a software development practice where quality control is continuously applied to the product as opposed to the traditional procedure of applying quality control after completing all development (during the so called integration phase). In essence, it is a way of decreasing the risks associated with the integration by spreading required efforts over time, which helps to improve on the quality of software, and to reduce the time taken to deliver it.

Given the limited amount of available resources, it is impossible for a single developer to test all combinations of configuration options and different compiler and library versions on all target platforms upon a commit. In order to address this problem, the [TravisCI system] (https://travis-ci.org/nest/nest-simulator) is triggered for every pull request to the central source code repository.

This allows for regular and automated testing of changes that are getting into the tree and timely reporting of identified problems. This way, issues will be discovered earlier and the amount of efforts to fix them will be significantly decreased.

Build jobs

The CI system is set up to run upon commits to branches that are related to a pull request, or for commits that are in a fork for which CI is enabled. Whenever changes are detected, the latest source code is downloaded to an executor machine and the following actions are performed:

  • Install optional and mandatory packages that NEST may use
  • Perform static source code analysis using Vera++
  • Perform static source code analysis using Cppcheck
  • Check source code formatting using ClangFormat
  • Bootstrap the build system
  • Build and install NEST
  • Run the test suite

If any of these steps fails (returns a non-zero exit code), the build is marked as failed and a notification is added to the commit or pull request on GitHub.

Further reading