Quintiq Technical ThoughtWorthSharing 

Software development requires a streamlined process of design, implementation and testing of the solution. One of the most important goals of this process is to ensure the quality of the solution. Ensuring the quality can however be a challenge when you are working with a large development team and are constantly extending a solution. For example how do you prevent that a change to an existing function does not break the solution?. Or how can we make sure that when we merge changes made by different developers, the solution still behaves as expected? The answer is simple: by extensive testing of the application. But extensive testing costs effort and time and will slow down the whole process. The key question therefore is:

How can we establish a development process that ensures high quality without affecting the speed of delivery.

This is where Continuous Integration comes in. Continuous integration is the software development practice of automatically testing and compiling changes made by developers as they happen. The diagram below illustrates this process.

DELMIA Quintiq Continuous Integration or simply DQ-CI is the DELMIA Quintiq specific implementation of Continuous integration. It's main features are:

1. Error checking - Quintiq models are checked for errors and warnings on every commit
2. Fully automated - no cimplicated scripts to run, the whole process is automated without manual intervention
3. Full Quintiq version support - All Quintiq version from 5.2 and onwards are supported. New software versions are added as soon as these have been released.
4. Automated testing - DQ-CI supports running test scripts that are generated using the Unit Test, Functional Test and Integration test Frameworks
5. Database support - if required, data can be loaded from MS SQL Databases
6. Model quality assessment - Model metrics to measure the quality of the model are automatically generated and reported after every build.

To realize these features, DQ-CI makes use of various technologies besides DELMIA Quintiq software. The key technologies used are

• Bitbucket: the repository in which all changes to the model (commits) are stored.
• Jenkins: automation tool that manages the CI process
• Docker: containerization softwae to deploy Quintiq components and MS SQL Server on demand.

The good thing about the DQ-CI solution is that as a developer or consultant you don't need to be aware of the underlying technologies. You just need to commit your code and DQ-CI will take care of the process and send you a report of its findings.

I hope I have teased you enough to learn more about DQ-CI. There is an excellent e-learning about DQ-CI that can be found in DELMIA Quintiq Academy.

Please don't hesitate to contact me in case of any question related to DQ-CI.