We’ve all heard of ridiculous laws that exist on the books. You know the kind I mean:

• It’s illegal to keep an aligator in a bathtub.
• Anyone found keeping an ice cream cone in their pocket may be fined.
• It is illegal to wear the U.S. flag.

Of course these types of laws raise an interesting philisophical question: Is a law that we ignore actually a law? And in the case of the last one, the U.S. Supreme court has actually declared the law prohibiting the wearing of the flag as an unconstitutional restriction on free speech.

I suppose we could debate the technical definition of when a law ceases to be a law simply because it’s ignored and unenforced… (and no doubt, many legal scolars do, and have).

But what about the more daily things? Agreements we make with our teams, for example. “We’re going to write tests for all new features” is a common agreement I see being made, and ignored.

What about continuous integration?

“We will all integrate our code at least once per day,” is the rough definition of continuous integration. How often does this agreement get ignored?

CI is as CI does. If you aren’t continuously integration, you don’t do CI.

How do you prevent useful working agreements from being ignored?