Samantha Quinones has a recent post to her blog about why you should consider continuous integration for your projects - some of the benefits and decisions that come along with it.

Last night at DCPHP, I gave a short “lightning” talk on Continuous Integration and Deployment in the context of PHP applications. I really like the lightning talk format as it forces you to focus on the meat of your topic– there’s no time to get distracted by details. As great as that is, though, I wanted to expand a little on the subject and touch on some of the details that I couldn’t include in my presentation.

She starts off by talking about what's wrong with a lot of the more traditional build and development practices, noting that "it sucks" because of the processes involved. With the help of continuous integration, some of the process can be automated and make for less human-related errors during a deployment. She talks about some of the things you'll need to do to prepare your codebase and a few things to think about your future setup like:

• what does a successful build look like?
• how much code needs to be covered by tests to deploy?
• should a build be successful if standards are broken or issues found?