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As recently as several years ago, the developers actually made the builds that went to clients. This was obviously a disaster for reasons too numerous to list.
Then when we started to learn the errors of our ways, we looked for a way to auto-build the entire application on a dedicated build machine. The culture at that time was very averse to bringing in outside tools, so we built our own autobuild system by writing a VB app.
This worked fine for a while, until the project's structure started to change, new projects were added, and we needed to build the application in different ways. Then then weaknesses of our hand-rolled autobuilder became apparent and, over time, increasingly onerous. This disease has progressed now to the point where QA (who owns our build process) can't even maintain the autobuilder because it requires more and more programming skill. Every time we add a project or change something in an existing project, it consumes more developer time just to make it work. There have been days when we were unable to produce a build because the system was broken.
I'm now in a position where I can change this process, and I'm looking to scrap the entire system and put something else in it's place. My goals are:
Have an autobuild system that can run with zero human interaction at a specific time every day. It should be able to gather all the source code, compile all the apps, create the setups, put the finished products on a network share, and possibly trigger the automated testing system to kick in (we use QTP).
The autobuild system should be flexible enough to easily adapt to changes in the project without rrequiring a major overhaul.
It should be simple enough so that QA can own the system and not require developer resources to make changes to how builds are made.
What are your experiences? Can you recommend an autobuild system? Should I have different goals?
I'm currently using CruiseControl integrated with Ant to control project builds. This allows flexibility of build schedules and means you can automate the entire build process fairly easily using Ant scripts. Also, during defect fixing periods you can have CruiseControl set up to watch for source control submissions instead of time periods and build when these occur. This allows developers very quick feedback on defect fixes.
I use FinalBuilder and FinalBuilder Server for nightly builds. It's a bit buggy at times, but if you think it through it's quite easy to create extensible projects that can build X project type, build it's database from change scripts and deploy it to a testing server.
It can also handle all kinds of wierd and wonderful things like ZIPing a nightly build and uploading it to an FTP or creating ISO images automatically.
Definitely look into MSBuild if you're on the Microsoft stack.
Joel is always going on and on about how great FinalBuilder is, so that might be worth a look as well.
We just migrated from a hand-rolled set of Perl scripts to a Buildbot setup. I found it because that's what Google's using for Chrome.
You can do nightlies, or it can integrate with source control to do an isolated test build whenever anybody does a checkin, or a variety of other things. It's also parallel; you can have more than one machine in the build farm, either for specialized duties or just to handle more load.
The entire system is written in Python, so it's platform-agnostic, which is important if you need to do builds on more than one platform. It can do anything you can do from the command line; we have it calling MSBuild for user-mode components, a DDK build for kernel-mode pieces, and running products for unit test builds.
Out of the box it supports most OSS source control tools, but if you're using TFS or something else you may need to modify the package that you install on the slave machines.
I think you are on the right track here.
Whoever looks after your automated build process needs to have a fundamental understanding of how your solution fits together. This doesn't necessarily mean knowing how to write code or architect solutions, but they will require a solid understanding of how the solution compiles, packages itself etc.
You might need to share responsibility for builds between people or teams to accomplish this. I'd say that a daily build is a "team responsibility".
I'd look at establishing a baseline build configuration which can be extended for "special use" builds (besides just building a release version), e.g. internationalized releases, fxCop/Quality Tools config, build + run Unit Tests, continuous integration builds, a build config to run on developer workstations, etc.
Instead, I'd aim to achieve the following:
Automatic versioning, signing etc
Ability to produce verbose output (logging) to help debug build breaks
On that point - it should handle errors properly, capture as much information and log it properly
Consistency - It should work the same way each time to produce repeatable outcomes
Run in a clean, limited access environment
Well commented/documented so that it can be understood by new staff, etc.
Option to generate release notes, compile metrics, produce reports (if this option is available)
Ability to deploy to multiple environments
Support different ways to obtain source code from source control, e.g. by changeset, label, date, etc
As for tool recommendations, I've used FinalBuilder, Visual Build Pro, MSBuild/Team Build, nAnt, CruiseControl and CIFactory plus and good old fashioned batch files.
Each has its pros and cons, I'm not going to make a recommendation except to say that the products with decent UI support were a little bit easier to work with, but at times were far less powerful. If you're working with VIsual Studio, MSBuild is very powerful, but has a somewhat steep learning curve.
As of tools delivered with MS Visual Studio you might want to use MSBuild. Additional Community toolsets for MSBuild will even give you the possibility to checkout code from Subversion and zip output.
We're using it successfully in our company. Projects consists of several solutions with 100+ subprojects. Works like a charm.
Visual Build Pro is nice, if your build machines are Windows. I think this would fill the requirement you have about QA owning the system. But don't get me wrong, it's pretty powerful.
We use CruiseControl.NET and UppercuT (which uses NAnt) to do this. UppercuT uses conventions for building so it makes it really easy for someone to get started by answering three questions (What is the solution named? What is the path to source control? What is your company's name?) and you are building.
http://code.google.com/p/uppercut/
Some good explanations here: UppercuT
We use the Hudson buildbot for for big Java web app building from ant build scripts. Hudson is pretty sweet for our purposes. It has a master/slave setup so builds can be done concurrently (on a timer or on-demand). Slave nodes can be any OS/hardware combo provided it has the needed build tools already on it and is on the network (and won't crash every 10 min).
Full web-based interface including live console output, change logs, artifacts from the build are available across the network including previous builds (if successful). Awesomesauce!
Related
My team wants to set up a continuous integration server for a flex 4 project that we are developing. I have been evaluating various options and have some questions.
Really torn between Cruise Control and Hudson/Jenkins. Continuous integration servers for Flex shows at least two successful installations of Hudson for Flex.
Which source control should we use? I am personally inclined towards GIT, but looks like SVN has a lot more in-built support in both CC and Hudson.
In the worst case scenario, we might be forced to use VSS. What is the support for VSS like?
Regards,
Ravi.
First, NEVER USE VSS. Biggest POS out there. Cruise Control/Hudson/Bamboo/Teamcity/etc are just build servers, but they need something to build with like Ant or Maven. After the build is done, they normally deploy whatever was created to your place of choosing. Any one of them will work just fine unless you have some very specific requirements.
As for version control, all of them can be used with the build server so it comes down to preference. In a team environment, I prefer Git; however, it is a bit more 'complex' to use than subversion, so training might be involved. But trust me, a lot less headaches merging with Git than subversion.
The most important part of the whole equation is your Ant or Maven build file. I personally recommend using Maven over Ant since the dependency management is wonderful for larger projects. You'll also want to take a look at the FlexMojos project to compile/test your Flex application.
I am attempting to convince my colleagues to start using a build server and automated building for our Silverlight application. I have justified it on the grounds that we will catch integration errors more quickly, and will also always have a working dev copy of the system with the latest changes. But some still don't get it.
What are the most significant advantages of using a Build Server for your project?
There are more advantages than just finding compile errors earlier (which is significant):
Produce a full clean build for each check-in (or daily or however it's configured)
Produce consistent builds that are less likely to have just worked due to left-over artifacts from a previous build
Provide a history of which change actually broke a build
Provide a good mechanism for automating other related processes (like deploy to test computers)
Continuous integration reveals any problems in the big picture, as different teams/developers work in different parts of the code/application/system
Unit and integration tests ran with the each build go even deeper and expose problems that would maybe not be seen on the developer's workstation
Free coffees/candy/beer. When someone breaks the build, he/she makes it up for the other team members...
I think if you can convince your team members that there WILL be errors and integration problems that are not exposed during the development time, that should be enough.
And of course, you can tell them that the team will look ancient in the modern world if you don't run continuous builds :)
See Continuous Integration: Benefits of Continuous Integration :
On the whole I think the greatest and most wide ranging benefit of Continuous Integration is reduced risk. My mind still floats back to that early software project I mentioned in my first paragraph. There they were at the end (they hoped) of a long project, yet with no real idea of how long it would be before they were done.
...
As a result projects with Continuous Integration tend to have dramatically less bugs, both in production and in process. However I should stress that the degree of this benefit is directly tied to how good your test suite is. You should find that it's not too difficult to build a test suite that makes a noticeable difference. Usually, however, it takes a while before a team really gets to the low level of bugs that they have the potential to reach. Getting there means constantly working on and improving your tests.
If you have continuous integration, it removes one of the biggest barriers to frequent deployment. Frequent deployment is valuable because it allows your users to get new features more rapidly, to give more rapid feedback on those features, and generally become more collaborative in the development cycle. This helps break down the barriers between customers and development - barriers which I believe are the biggest barriers to successful software development.
From my personal experience, setting up a build server and implementing CI process, really changes the way the project is conducted. The act of producing a build becomes an uneventful everyday thing, because you literally do it every day. This allows you to catch things earlier and be more agile.
Also note that setting build server is only a part of the CI process, which includes setting up tests and ultimately automating the deployment (very useful).
Another side-effect benefit that often doen't get mentioned is that CI tools like CruiseControl.NET becomes the central issuer of all version numbers for all branches, including internal RCs. You could then enforce your team to always ship a build that came out of the CI tool, even if it's a custom version of the product.
Early warning of broken or incompatible code means that all conflicts are identified asap, thereby avoiding last minute chaos on the release date.
When your boss says "I need a copy of the latest code ASAP" you can get it to them in < 5 minutes.
You can make the build available to internal testers easily, and when they report a bug they can easily tell you "it was the April 01 nightly build" so that you can work with the same version of the source code.
You'll be sure that you have an automated way to build the code that doesn't rely on libraries / environment variables / scripts / etc. that are set up in developers' environments but hard to replicate by others who want to work with the code.
We have found the automatic VCS tagging of the exact code that produce a version very helpful in going back to a specific version to replicate an issue.
Integration is a blind spot
Integration often doesn't get any respect - "we just throw the binaries into an installer thingie". If ithis doesn't work, it's the installers fault.
Stable Build Environment
Prevents excuses such as "This error sometimes occurs when built on Joe's machine". Prevents using old dependent libraries accidentally when building on Mikes machine.
True dogfooding
You inhouse testers and users have a true customer experience. Your developers have a clear reference for reproducing errors.
My manager told us we needed to set them up for two major reasons. None were really to do with the final project but to make sure what is checked in or worked on is correct.
First to clean up DLL Hell. When someone builds on their local machine they can be pointing at any reference folder. Lots of projects were getting built with the wrong versions of dlls from someone not updating their local folder. In the build server it will always be built of the same source. All you have to do is get latest to get the latest references.
The second major thing for us was a way to support projects with little knowledge of them. Any developer can go grab the source and do a minor fix if required. They don't have to mess with hours of set up or finding references. We have an overseas team that works primarily on a project but if there is a rush fix we need to do during US hours we can grab latest and be able to build not have to worry about broken source or what didn't get checked in. Gated checkins save everyone else on your team time.
95% of my time I program ASP.NET (MVC) web sites.
Should I care about MSBuild?
We use MSBuild with CruiseControl.Net to manage the builds of most of our big ASP.NET projects. For every commit of one member of the team, a build is launched. It helps us detect
quickely incompatibilities before moving a feature to "staging" or "production".
I think it is really usefull when working with a team on the same ASP.NET project or if you are working alone on a big project.
That depends on your development environment.
If you have other folks that do deployment of your systems, and they take care of the build and deployment environment, then MSBuild probably won't be necessary for your work.
On the other hand, if you need to configure the build script to understand special situations that your code comes up with, then you will definitely need to understand MSBuild scripts.
Even for a one-man shop, it's a useful tool to know, especially if you are configuring a continuous integration server like Hudson.
No. Until you have to.
Its not absolutely necessary to know MS Build, but it is useful to know.
It might not be needed for all kind of projects, but it is extremely useful when you are working on a huge code base with automated custom build solution/ nightly build/developer builds so on and so forth.
It's unlikely, unless you choose to use it, or you start to make use of Team Foundation Server's Team Build.
Your development processes need to get to a certain complexity before automated builds really deliver their true value and/or if you find need for automatic deployment (including database changes if applicable).
The coming Visual Studio 2010 is going to make it far easier to use, but for now it retains a fairly steep learning curve which you can avoid by using alternatives, or commercial products (e.g. Visual Build Pro, Final Builder etc).
The nice thing is that it is part of the .Net framework, so it's already available as long as you have the framework installed (which it probably is).
So, in short, not really. It's something very useful and powerful though, setting up deployments using MSBuild can be very, very useful.
What should a developer know about MsBuild?
Every developer should know it exists and it's basic capabilities. If know it exists you won't duplicate its features and will know what it can do for you, when you need it.
Minimum:
As an exercise, build your project through the command line: msbuild myproj.sln
Know the role of continuous integration
A little more than minimum:
Hack your csproj (or vbproj) with a message task, so it outputs something during clean.
All done. When you need to know more, you'll figure it out.
I'm starting a new project using Flex3 for a reasonably intricate UI getting its data from a collection of RESTful web services. I wondering what experiences others have had in structuring a moderately complex Flex project. The issues I'm thinking about include:
I want to use our FlexBuilder licenses for visual editing of layouts and debugging code on Eclipse
automated build script so that we can use a CI server
testing strategies, particularly automatable unit tests
cross-platform Linux and Windows development environments (yes, I know the Linux version of FlexBuilder doesn't do visual editing, but everything else should ideally run cross-platform)
dependency management for at least the Java code (are there library dependency managers for Flex?)
I've just burned a day trying and failing to get a maven2/flex/jetty build setup working smoothly (based on Jeff Maury's tutorial). I'm not dead-against using Maven as we go forwards, but I'm sure there must be a less painful route. The main issue I had (other than maven documentation being patchy) is that maven's "single artifact per build" rule means that you have to jump through a lot of hoops with a complex build, and I'm not enough of a maven initiate not to trip over the hoops and fall on my face!
Would Ant and Ivy be a better option than maven2? What other choices are there?
I don't know Flex development but I know CI so I'll comment on that aspect.
I work on CruiseControl, so that's what I use (when not being paid to setup something else). And there are blog entries that describe setting up Flex projects under CC for both Windows and Linux. CC has been around for a long time so there is a large community of users and lots of 3rd party tools that work with it.
But other people are likely to recommend Hudson and it would be hard to argue against them. Hudson is very easy to get up and running and has a nice web based UI. This project is very active, has lots of fans and lots of buzz and has matured very rapidly. I don't have anything bad to say about it. This blog entry describes running acceptance tests under Hudson.
I don't know enough about Maven to offer advice there but I'm working with Ivy at a client right now and I really like it. We've got a combination of Java and C++ code and we're able to get Ivy to do what we need.
Well we are using maven. With some help of a lot of different web sties I have an enterprise application being built using maven.
This article via adobe has really help a lot.
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/fullstack_pt1.html
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/fullstack_pt2.html
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/fullstack_pt3.html
You really need a common configuration project that will be shared between both flex and java, and possibly your c++ code. This article explains how to set that all up.
Down side, if you are not knowledgeable with maven there is a slight learning curve.
My team works on a Medium sized product which takes about 2 hours to build on a single dual-core machine.
As part of an effort to improve productivity I am looking for alternatives to improve our build process.
Currently we build C++ code and .NET code using VS2005 solutions, we also have some legacy code built using makefiles and we pack the products using installshield. We also have unit tests written in UnitTest++, Nunit, CPPUnit and some tests that we wrote ourselves without any testing framework. Everything is coordinated by a set of Perl scripts that we wrote.
I am looking for a product, or a suite of products, or a bunch of non-related products that will allow me to do the following:
Improve building time. I tried Incredibuild for parallelizing the build with some success. I will be happy to find more alternatives (cheaper ones???)
Improve the build process definition. I need something to replace our complicated perl scripts with something that will allow me to define the build process easily.
Improve our ability to discover problems in the build (maybe a web interface for looking at build outputs, highlight compilation errors, gather statistics on build times and build failures etc.
Any other nice features that can help us improve our build management.
Consider NAnt: http://nant.sourceforge.net/, CruiseControl: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CruiseControl, and a faster build system. there are some .NET related links at: http://confluence.public.thoughtworks.org/dashboard.action
Edit: Gradle is probably the best choice now.
Try FinalBuilder it's very compreshesnsive build managment tool
Sakin,
I think you may be looking for two different tools - although occassionally you will find them packaged together.
One tool would be the build management system that schedules the builds, shows you the outputs, gathers statistics, etc. Tools like FinalBuilder, CruiseControl and AnthillPro play in that space.
The other tool would be the one that tears apart your build into parallelizeable pieces and speeds the build. Incredibuild is pretty good at what they do in that respect and certainly cheaper than some alternatives. There are free options built into some of the open source tools like gmake, but my understanding is that you'd need to do some pretty serious work to get that to work with solution files.
You should be able to mix and match at will. We have customers using Anthill with Incredibuild, gmake, and a number of other build speeding tools.
I used Automated QA's Automated Build Studio a few years ago at a previous job and it was pretty good and fairly cheap. I haven't used it since then, so I'm just recommending you look at it.
If you have an MSDN subscription you should look at TFS. TFS Build is pretty robust and is integrated into Visual Studio and works hand in hand with Team System/TFS Source Control (you didn't say what source control you're using).
We have a process similar to yours, although it's not a VS project. Up until recently we used perl scripts and tinderbox to build and track the status of the builds and unit tests. We've recently made the jump over to Hudson and it seems to work great.
https://hudson.dev.java.net/
Don't be put off by the java label, our projects are c/c++ and they work fine. Hudson can execute shell commands, so we can build our projects (makefiles) and run our unit tests fine. Right now we have it set on a timed build, which when it finishes (if successfully) kicks all our unit tests off in parallel.
It's a great system and worth checking out if it's what you're looking for. It logs console ouput and has tons of great addons (logs and charts warning counts, disk space used size, build on CM change) and a nice web-interface for the team to watch.
Oh yea it's free..
I wouldnt advise HUDSON .. there is unnecessary too much bragging about it ..
hudson is limited tools other than it can do much more and have a better bui8lt core architecture
The suggestion to go with anthillpro and incredibuild is a good one !!
With regard to the "Hudson has extensive plugins .. blah blah blah " its really is a sham ..
What ever hudson CANNOT achieve it is core architecture it does so as a plugin
Surprisingly if i have to mask a passsword or any credential i cannot do it without the "password masking" plugin ..
Ideally if a system is "enterprise scalable" this masking should be built into it core
This just one example .. i have a clear analysis for these tools but cannot upload a document here
Moving to the other side
Hudson "looks and feels" "nice & cute" and is relatively light weight