Download the whitepaper by John Graham-Cumming titled "The Agile Heartbeat" with practical tips for achieving agile builds and continuous integration.
Agile Software Development with Electric Cloud
Solving Agile Development and Continuous Integration Challenges
The best indicator of software development success is working code. This is an idea that extends beyond specific Agile software development methods — more and more teams, from ISVs to enterprise IT teams, are recognizing the benefits of integrating early and often. But tool and process improvements in the build and release cycle are absolutely critical to realizing that goal.
To a build manager or team lead, the words 'multiple integrations per day' and 'continuous integration' mean a radical change from once-nightly (or even less frequent) builds. Adopting continuous integration or an agile build approach requires fast, highly automated builds and integration between source control and the build system.
Agile Development Challenge
Impact
Electric Cloud Solution
Builds require manual intervention
Integrating often will overwhelm a manual build process
Automate build and release processes
Integrate with existing SCM tools to enable continuous integration
Slow build cycle (whether long individual builds or a large number of build targets)
Long builds limit the number of iterations possible in a day
Builds longer than ~30 minutes rule out continuous integration
Run jobs or individual steps in parallel across multiple servers to speed builds as much as 20x
Developers introducing errors during integration or production builds
If developers can't do "pre-flight" builds prior to check-in, time will be wasted hunting down causes of build breakages
Provide shared, secure access to build and release resources from anywhere
Set up a "developer sandbox" area with machines dedicated to builds prior to code check-in
There are ways to develop some build automation capabilities on your own, but most homegrown approaches are inherently brittle and require ongoing maintenance.
Learn more about how ElectricCommander, ElectricAccelerator, and ElectricInsight automate, accelerate, and analyze agile build and release processes.
