Does a continuous build pipeline need to generate packages?

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Posted on by Rich

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The documentation for a continuous integration pipeline has the Generate packages step before the Execute Tests step. I'm curious on two fronts:

Would you ever want to use a package if the tests fail? If not (which is my instinct), why not have Generate packages dependent on Execute Tests and save time & storage?
Assuming that a continuous integration pipeline has a complementary nightly build, when would you use the CI pipeline package? I'm thinking the nightly pipeline package would be the one to deploy.

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Rich 271 on at

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RE: Does a continuous build pipeline need to generate packages?

Thanks for thoughts: I can see the validity of that opinion, as long as the team are on top of the test results & don't consider package generation to mean the build represents a release candidate.

Anyone have a view on question 2? If there are two pipelines, one run on check-in & one run nightly, are there benefits to having both generate packages? Potentially a higher update cadence if the CI package is manually deployed to a QA environment, but the QA downtime during deployment doesn't feel worth it to me.
Martin Dráb 230,414 Most Valuable Professional on at

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RE: Does a continuous build pipeline need to generate packages?

If you use nightly builds to deploy the latest code to a test environment every night, I think it makes sense to do it even if some tests fail. Otherwise you would prevent testing of all new code.