DVCS does not discourage Continuous Integration as long as the developer pushes remotely on a regular basis to their own branch and the CI server is setup so that it builds the known active branches.
I've been working on solving this problem over the last year. We added the ability to Bamboo (CI server by Atlassian) to detect new branches as they are created in the remote repository and automatically test the merge with master and optionally push the branch to master if everything is OK. If the merge or the tests fail, Bamboo lets you know immediately via email/XMPP/HipChat/etc.
Yes, it relies on developers being disciplined (read: responsible and professional) enough to push back to master in order to have the merge tested and the tests run.
Developers actually do it though because the benefits to having their feature branch tested regularly against master are huge: code is regularly merged and tested with master to ensure integration state and other team members are isolated from changes that can potentially damage development velocity.
Anyhow, if your interested in learning more, see my blog post called "Making Feature Branches effective with CI". I'd love more comments and thoughts if you have them.
I've been working on solving this problem over the last year. We added the ability to Bamboo (CI server by Atlassian) to detect new branches as they are created in the remote repository and automatically test the merge with master and optionally push the branch to master if everything is OK. If the merge or the tests fail, Bamboo lets you know immediately via email/XMPP/HipChat/etc.
Yes, it relies on developers being disciplined (read: responsible and professional) enough to push back to master in order to have the merge tested and the tests run.
Developers actually do it though because the benefits to having their feature branch tested regularly against master are huge: code is regularly merged and tested with master to ensure integration state and other team members are isolated from changes that can potentially damage development velocity.
Anyhow, if your interested in learning more, see my blog post called "Making Feature Branches effective with CI". I'd love more comments and thoughts if you have them.
http://blogs.atlassian.com/2012/04/bamboofeature-branch-cont...
Disclaimer: I am product manager for Bamboo @ Atlassian