Why automated build

Human error : Even a simple and carefully planned process is prone to human error. All of us have had our mouse finger stutter and accidentally click the wrong button, or have accidentally deleted the OS kernel happens more often than you'd think. Or maybe it's 1am and we're half-asleep and accidentally open up the production server instead of QA. This is simply unavoidable - we're not perfect, and therefore anything requiring human interaction has the potential for mistakes.

Security : Server and network security is always something to deal with as a software team. Usually there are two extremes - either server access is limited to the point where nobody has access to anything, with a month of red tape to set up a new employee - or your servers are fully opened up to everyone, and any member of your team could take down your system with one bad click. As a developer, I generally prefer the second one because I can actually get stuff done, but I see the danger of doing things this way.

Regardless of where your organization falls in this range, automation can only improve your process. Once you've identified your team's main pain points, you can design a solution specific to your needs. There's no one-size-fits-all solution - as long as you build something that reduces manual processes and makes things more consistent, you're headed in the right direction.

You've got to start with good source control practices. Regardless of whether you use SVN, Mercurial, Git, or TFS just please don't use SourceSafe , you need to define things like your branching strategy, how you handle third party and internal libraries, and how to organize your own projects within your repositories. Of course your team has to be on board; when someone goes rogue with a small project, they can screw up the whole process. One developer should take on the role of buildmaster.

This person will be responsible for writing the build scripts, setting up continuous integration, and probably will do the source control setup and deployments.

Unless you have a very large and complex environment, this work should only take up a small percentage of this person's time, so they can still do regular development work for the majority of the week. Even though you hope to never use it, an emergency plan should be built into your process, just like any other mission-critical application in your organization.

There's a good chance your build server will be a single point of failure - it probably won't be load-balanced, nor will it have a hot-backup in case the server spontaneously explodes. In cases like this, you want to make sure you can quickly build a new server, complete with configuration and permissions, and also have a Plan B for building your applications without a build server.

Even though the goal of this implementation is to never do anything manually again, it should always still be possible. Automation of your build process relies on simple, repeatable tasks. Build scripts are the first step. In the. NAnt is another common. NET build script tool, similar to Ant, a popular Java tool. Others include Make, common in the open source world, and Rake, found in Ruby.

No matter how you choose to write your build scripts, you should find something that works for you and stick with it. For example, once you've found the best way to build a web application project, setting up a script for a brand new web application should be as easy as copying the script from your other project and changing a few names and paths.

Implementation will obviously vary quite a bit between operating systems and programming frameworks, but the idea is generally the same. Typically, this is going to mean running a compiler against your code, using specific compilation options, and putting the output files somewhere separate from the original codebase, to prepare them for deployment.

Even in non-compiled projects, like static websites, you may have non-publishable content in your project, like test pages or debug scripts, which you want to keep together in source control, but not publish in this case your build script would stage out the files you do want to deploy, so you don't have to think about it every time. Want to minify your JavaScript files? Make a task for it. Need a unique timestamp in your code prior to compilation?

Make a task. Need to apply a fractal cryptographic algorithm to protect your cat forum website from falling into enemy hands? Add a task and get some help. Anything you can do from the command line can happen before or after your code compiles in your build process.

Most software projects are going to contain more than one piece. For example, you may have a web application, but you also have a separate data library that's part of the same overall solution. For this, a single master script is the way to go. This script is the controller which calls each individual script one at a time.

You'd have a script for each Visual Studio project, or Java package, or however your code is organized. Each of the individual scripts has tasks specific to just that one project, while the controller script contains any shared functionality. Try to make your scripts as reusable and generic as possible. Keep your paths relative instead of absolute, project-specific information defined in one place, and reusable stuff in your master script.

When a bug is fixed, testers get the new version quickly and can retest to see if the bug was really fixed. Developers who check in their changes right before the scheduled daily build know that they aren't going to hose everybody else by checking in something which "breaks the build" -- that is, something that causes nobody to be able to compile.

This is the equivalent of the Blue Screen of Death for an entire programming team, and happens a lot when a programmer forgets to add a new file they created to the repository. The build runs fine on their machines, but when anyone else checks out, they get linker errors and are stopped cold from doing any work. Outside groups like marketing, beta customer sites, and so forth who need to use the immature product can pick a build that is known to be fairly stable and keep using it for a while.

By maintaining an archive of all daily builds, when you discover a really strange, new bug and you have no idea what's causing it, you can use binary search on the historical archive to pinpoint when the bug first appeared in the code.

Combined with good source control, you can probably track down which check-in caused the problem. When a tester reports a problem that the programmer thinks is fixed, the tester can say which build they saw the problem in. Then the programmer looks at when he checked in the fix and figure out whether it's really fixed. Allow me to begin by blatantly ripping off Wikipedia.

Bear in mind, these are the general benefits of continuous integration, of which nightly builds should be considered a partial implementation. Obviously, your system will be more powerful if you couple nightly builds with your bed of automated unit, functional, etc. If we're just talking about a nightly build strategy in isolation, what you get is a constant sanity check that your codebase compiles on the test platform s , along with a snapshot in time detailing who to blame.

Couple this with automated testing and a sane strategy of continuous integration, and suddenly you have a robust suite that gives you who failed the tests in addition to who broke the build. Good deal, if you ask me. You can read about the disadvantages in the remainder of the article, but remember, this is Wikipedia we're talking about here.

So that you know when you've broken something as soon as possible and can fix it while it's still fresh in your head, rather than weeks later. Integrity of your Unit Test is automatically tested. So you need not to worry about functionality of your program is not broken because of changes made by others.

Automatically gets the latest Checked-In files and compiles, so any compile error caused by other reported. Instant e-Mail acknowledgment on failure and successful execution of build.

So you get to who failed the build. So while build it automatically checks the Coding Standards. If one doesn't do full builds on a regular basis, one can end up with a situation where some part of a program that should have been recompiled isn't, that the failure to compile that part of the program conceals a breaking change.

Partial builds will continue to work fine, but the next full build will cause things to break for no apparent reason. Getting things to work after that can be a nightmare. One potential social benefit: automated builds could decrease toxicity among team members. If developers are repeatedly carrying out a multi-step process one or more times per day, mistakes are going to creep in. With manual builds, teammates might have the attitude, "My incompetent developers can't remember how to do builds right every day.

You'd think they have it down by now. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Collectives on Stack Overflow.

Learn more. Why automate builds? Ask Question. Other uncategorized cookies are those that are being analyzed and have not been classified into a category as yet. This cookie is used by the online calculators on the website. Without the Calculated Fields cookie the instant quotation may not work.

Welcome Username. Remember Me. Forgot Password. Not a Member? Automated Build. The build may include: compiling source files packaging compiled files into compressed formats such as jar, zip producing installers creating or updating of database schema or data The build is automated when these steps are repeatable, require no direct human intervention, and can be performed at any time with no information other than what is stored in the source code control repository.

However, it brings benefits of its own: eliminating a source of variation, and thus of defects; a manual build process containing a large number of necessary steps offers as many opportunities to make mistakes requiring thorough documentation of assumptions about the target environment, and of dependencies on third party products.

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