CITCON: Twenty Years of Continuous Improvement
CITCON has been scribbling its history on the Conference Wiki since 2007. Fast-forward twenty years, and the notes reveal just how far things have shifted.
The Early Years: Nuts and Bolts
In the late 2000s and early 2010s, the session boards read like a hands-on field manual for continuous integration and testing. Topics revolved around getting the basics right: conceptual problems with Ant and Maven, CI roadmaps, test refactoring, acceptance testing, release management, and the first forays into continuous deployment. The community was establishing shared discipline and vocabulary while transitioning from trading patterns to pipelines, version control, and metrics.
Broadening Horizons
By 2012, the mix became broader but still strongly technical. Sessions tackled browser automation, multi-platform build automation, meaningful metrics, and code reviews tied to CI, alongside risk management and testing in production. The conversation shifted from “make CI work” to “use CI to shape delivery.”
Mid-2010s: Sociotechnical Balance
Mid-2010s sessions added scale and modern tooling. Jenkins AMAs, Docker “learn” sessions, monorepos, and GUI test automation sat next to people-centred conversations about learning mindsets and testing organisations. Continuous delivery became a lived practice with side effects to manage, not a novelty. The agenda now balanced platform choices with team habits.
2023 to 2024: AI Arrives
From 2023 into 2024, AI became a thread through many slots: using ChatGPT day to day, testing AI systems, and exploring TDD with AI. Platform engineering, supply chain concerns, observability shift-left, productivity tooling, and leadership war stories sat comfortably alongside chess, books, and games. The centre of gravity moved from tool adoption to outcomes and resilience. The sessions even wrestled with YAML pipeline ergonomics and whether code quality was still important.
2025: A Mature Mix
In 2025, the sessions leaned into a mature sociotechnical mix. Auckland combined unit testing culture, technical debt, and pipeline security with reflective topics like personal improvement habits, work and life balance, and shared responsibility. Woking paired nuts-and-bolts craft such as Git plumbing with exploratory threads like multi-agent AI personas and vibe-first coding. Inclusion was on the agenda too, with sessions on CBT, autism in tech, older female developers, and tricky manager dynamics.
Looking Back, Looking Forward
CITCON’s journey could be summed up like this: it started with build scripts and test harnesses, grew into pipelines and deployments, widened into people, culture, and leadership, and now wrestles with AI, inclusion, and work and life sanity. What has not changed is the spirit: a roomful of smart, curious people tearing into whatever comes next. The 2025 boards prove the point: one minute it’s Git plumbing, the next it’s multi-agent AI personas or surviving tricky managers. CITCON has always been about continuous improvement, and the conference itself is Exhibit A, endlessly refactoring just like the code we all wish we wrote.