Agile vs commit often Continuous builds

[Liana Melissa]

Hello, I'm just doing some formal training in Agile at the moment and one question I have is about the value of continuous builds vs value of committing to the version control system often.

My understanding with version control is that it's better to commit often because then you have history and the ability to go back to previous changes in a fine-grained way.

My understanding of Agile and continuous build is that its there to put pressure on the developers to always have working code. That to break the source tree is a taboo thing to do.

Now I agree with both of these sentiments, but it occurs to me that sometimes these might be working against each other. You may be in the middle of a largish code change and want to commit code to make sure you have history, but this will break the source tree.

Anybody got any thoughts on this?

Thanks in advance

[Danny Saro]

Hi Liana,

This is a question for the "Rally Software" community, you have mistakenly posted it in the Agile Requirements Designer community. You'll get more response (I hope :-) ) if you repost it in the former.

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Cheers,
Danny
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[Pavel Sestak]

Hi Liana,
I think this question  is related to Agile Requirements Designer (ARD). 
I understand Agile and continuous build as opportunity to verify your commits earlier. It is not about having just latest working code,  but having committed a code that is build-able, so developers can fix issues earlier with lower cost of fixing it. 
With ARD we allow user to do TDD and BDD approaches. So with continuous building you can practice continuous testing. This brings to developer information that code he just committed is not just build-able but also it does not introduce regression defects. So again he is saving time when fixing issues earlier.
ARD is part of Broadcom Continuous Testing segment, If you are interested in this approach you may learn more on https://www.blazemeter.com/
Regards,
Pavel

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Product Owner
Broadcom
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