⚪ ️ 5.2 Shorten the feedback loop with local developer-CI
:white_check_mark: Do: Using a CI with shiny quality inspections like testing, linting, vulnerabilities check, etc? Help developers run this pipeline also locally to solicit instant feedback and shorten the feedback loop. Why? an efficient testing process constitutes many and iterative loops: (1) try-outs -> (2) feedback -> (3) refactor. The faster the feedback is, the more improvement iterations a developer can perform per-module and perfect the results. On the flip, when the feedback is late to come fewer improvement iterations could be packed into a single day, the team might already move forward to another topic/task/module and might not be up for refining that module.
Practically, some CI vendors (Example: CircleCI local CLI) allow running the pipeline locally. Some commercial tools like wallaby provide highly-valuable & testing insights as a developer prototype (no affiliation). Alternatively, you may just add npm script to package.json that runs all the quality commands (e.g. test, lint, vulnerabilities) — use tools like concurrently for parallelization and non-zero exit code if one of the tools failed. Now the developer should just invoke one command — e.g. ‘npm run quality’ — to get instant feedback. Consider also aborting a commit if the quality check failed using a githook (husky can help)
❌ Otherwise: When the quality results arrive the day after the code, testing doesn’t become a fluent part of development rather an after the fact formal artifact
✏ Code Examples
:clap: Doing It Right Example: npm scripts that perform code quality inspection, all are run in parallel on demand or when a developer is trying to push new code
{
"scripts": {
"inspect:sanity-testing": "mocha **/**--test.js --grep \"sanity\"",
"inspect:lint": "eslint .",
"inspect:vulnerabilities": "npm audit",
"inspect:license": "license-checker --failOn GPLv2",
"inspect:complexity": "plato .",
"inspect:all": "concurrently -c \"bgBlue.bold,bgMagenta.bold,yellow\" \"npm:inspect:quick-testing\" \"npm:inspect:lint\" \"npm:inspect:vulnerabilities\" \"npm:inspect:license\""
},
"husky": {
"hooks": {
"precommit": "npm run inspect:all",
"prepush": "npm run inspect:all"
}
}
}