Sign Up to our social questions and Answers Engine to ask questions, answer people’s questions, and connect with other people.
Login to our social questions & Answers Engine to ask questions answer people’s questions & connect with other people.
Lost your password? Please enter your email address. You will receive a link and will create a new password via email.
Please briefly explain why you feel this question should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this answer should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this user should be reported.
What is the difference between nightly builds and continuous integration? Is it just the frequency of checkin/build/test? For example, if a nightly build process were run every hour or every minute would it be indistinguishable from CI?
This question is similar but not identical: Continuous Integration vs. Nightly Builds
Continuous Integration focuses on building (and running tests) every time a checkin is done. Nightly builds do it once a day and may emphasize testing less.
In practice the continuous integration checkins that trigger building and running tests might be separate from checkins that a developer does throughout the day. They might occur, for instance, only when checking in to the trunk while most development for the day is checked in to a branch. It is encouraged that these occur relatively frequently, for instance once a day.
Building more frequently would produce similar results but would probably result in some wasted effort, that is running tests when nothing has changed. Another possible difference is that a significant level of testing is done with each build in continuous integration. Sometimes requiring developer intervention to fix errors that result. This would be more difficult with a nightly build process for several reasons. Including being more difficult to tie the errors to a particular set of changes and responsible party.