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Comment by convolvatron | Hacker News Reader

if you can't even _run your own software to perform tests_ then maybe you should reconsider developing software

Whether we can run the tests ourselves, and whether we want to spend the engineering time to build and/or maintain an in-house CI system are two very different questions.

Whether a developer (or business person) made a business decision to outsource CI has nothing to do with technical competence.

Using SaaS for any business data has a risk, but usually it's worth it. I'm sure you use slack, slack could be breached, and I'm sure no one at your company has ever slacked a password to someone else.

> whether we want to spend the engineering time to build and/or maintain an in-house CI system are two very different questions

Developers tend to trivialize this: we tend to only consider the initial setup time, and pretend no further work is necessary.

I've been spending the last year unravelling a ball of yarn wrapped in another ball of yarn because of "guy before me" syndrome who believed this. Fully.

I think I was reacting to my parent use of the word 'trivial' and 'keeping your house in order'. Its not that I believe that circle-ci has no value in any circumstance.

you can say that they are 'doing it wrong', but without execption the shops I've been in that use CI tools

  o have one guy, maybe no longer with the group, that set up the CI deployment and no one else knows how to deal with it
  o dont have a firm control of their development build and dependencies and the different CI environment is a constant source of shear
  o are running a service with its own deployment chain, which differs in environment from the CI server and should arguable be used for tests
  o dont have a decent way of running the tests outside the CI environment at all, which makes debugging CI failures pretty problematic 
  o because of the single maintainer issue, new tests often dont get integrated into the CI, which is really conterproductive
  o for distributed services and services with runtime dependencies, the CI isn't really providing the whole picture (meaning we should really be using the delopment tools to spin up transient test instances anyways)
  o the state in the CI often tool doesn't get packaged up with the repo, so it doesn't transition easily to other development teams

focussing on the 'keeping your house in order', CI is often providing a solution to a small part of the overall test and development problem and creating artifical boundaries.

I'm very sympathetic to avoiding wasting time on home grown solutions (even if they are as trivial as 'run these 50 tests and collect status). but if the development effort is sufficiently small, or sufficiently complex, I think external CI is actually costing more than its worth, or giving people a false sense of comfort about their testing and dependency management. thats all without considering any trust issues.

Services like Circle CI tend to add functionality like deployment, but the same is true.

That said, the same could be said of any piece in the stack: Why use a framework? Why use Github? Why use hosted email? Why use cloud? Why not hand new hires a blank laptop and a USB key with the latest Ubuntu?

> Why not hand new hires a blank laptop and a USB key with the latest Ubuntu?

That's what I got at my last two jobs (minus Ubuntu), and I loved it.

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