Volume 9 - Number 4 - April 2011

Build Management Essentials has been a core topic in the CM Journal for many years. Implementing effective build engineering strategies is essential for the success of any IT project, although developers often struggle with the complexities of setting up continuous integration servers along with using Ant, Maven, and Make. CM Crossroads has many forums that focus on Build Management at a very deep level and our articles in the CM Journal and the archives of CM Basics contain many tips and tricks for succeeding at this challenging endeavor. Joe Townsend gets us started this month by explaining that Build Management should be very straightforward, and to the point, while Leslie Sachs somehow managed to bring together separation anxiety, loose cannons, and obsessive compulsive disorder in her "Personality Matters" column. Joe Farah presents "CM: THE NEXT GENERATION of Build Essentials," and I relate my own experiences implementing rapid iterative build, package, and deploy in my "Behaviorally Speaking" column.

We'll take a look back at Ben Weatherall's "Finding Meaning in Your Build and Deploy Process" and Mayank Gupta's "Continuous Integration and Enterprise Build Automation." To take us across the finish line Brad Appleton, Robert Cowham, and Steve Berczuk inform us of "Breaking News; Build Still Important, but Deployment is King!" Build engineering is, indeed, essential, and you have come to the right place to learn everything that you need to know about Build Management Essentials. Make sure that you drop me a line, or even better, write a community blog sharing your own Build Management Essentials!

Bob Aiello
Editor in Chief
CM Crossroads
raiello@acm.org

Featured articles...

Build Management Essentials: The Basics and More by Joe Townsend Build Management should be very straightforward and to the point, but like most IT subjects it is far from simple.  To start off, build management is not the act of performing a build.  That is simply building code from source files.  The “management” of those builds by automating, scheduling, and accuracy of those builds is where the “management” side comes in.  I will be covering the basics of build management in this article, nothing complex, just the basics. Read More >>

Personality Matters – Build Management Essentials by Leslie Sachs Building code would seem to be a very straightforward technical task that would be done best by your favorite computer geek. There isn't much that would seem to be dependent upon personality and psychology in the workplace. However, the workplace is populated with human beings who use different communication styles and are filled with emotion and often quite fragile (and needy) in many ways.    Implementing repeatable build processes touches many of these key personality points as you interact with the developers who wrote the code and may have strong feelings about how their creations should be handled. Misstep and you find yourself not getting much cooperation from key stakeholders who can significantly impact your personal success or failure. Read on if you want to learn more about some key people skills essential to appreciating how and which personality factors which most impact one's ability to successfully implement core build and release management practices. Read More >>

CM: THE NEXT GENERATION of Build Essentials by Joe Farah It used to be that reproducibility was the holy grail of build process and capabilities.  While that is still the central requirement, good build management processes and tools can take you a lot further, a lot faster, and with better quality.  The steps are the same:  identify a build, select the updates (i.e. change packages) that are going into the build, create the build definition in the CM repository, and then click a magic button that causes the build to be built. Done. Read More >>

More articles...

Behaviorally Speaking – Build Management Essentials by Bob Aiello Implementing the tools and processes necessary to support build and release management is an important task that can make the difference between success or failure for your development effort. Build management can be your greatest asset or the source of many problems that could ultimately cost your team a lot of time and effort – along with the risk of increased defects resulting in poor quality. This article lays out the first things that you need to consider in order to win with build management essentials. Read More >> Finding Meaning in your Build and Deploy Process by Ben Weatherall This month's topic, "Build and Deployment Management," fits in with several of the previous topics (specifically "Minimizing the Requirements GIGO Factor," "CM Tool Chains & Their Management," and "Release Management") to cover most of the CM Life Cycle stages. Once again, let's define some terms: Build - The process of converting some precursor artifacts (source) into some desired output (testable component or product). Classically, this is thought of as "compiling," but it also includes such esoteric things as linking, packaging (think .jar, .cab and .tar files). A "build" is the end result of this process. Think of building as starting from base ingredients and ending up with a pie. Read More >>

Continuous Integration and Enterprise Build Automation by Mayank Gupta How often have you or one of your teammates checked the source code into the code library which then instantly triggered an automated build?  How many times did this instant build succeed? Do you have an automated build and release system that ensures your software is built in the same way each and every time? Are deployments to staging environments entirely automated and executed with a single click? While reviewing a defect in a production release, are you able to backtrack through the source code changes and identify the root cause of failure? If the last good checkin happened a few days ago, identification of this root cause of failure would become even more difficult. Seasoned CM practitioners advise that you perform a daily build to avoid such integration issues. What an irony it is that only a few projects take advantage of this simple, yet powerful technique known as Continuous Integration (CI). Read More >>

Breaking News; Build Still Important, but Deployment is King! by Brad Appleton, Robert Cowham, and Steve Berczuk    Build and Deployment are subjects which are dear to our hearts and we have written quite a lot about them over the years. While the details may change from year to year as technology evolves, the underlying principles remain the same. Regarding building, we are going to take the opportunity to provide a guide to some of our previous articles which still hold true. For deployment, we suggest that the rise of web applications and Web 2.0 shows deployment as one of the main drivers for many aspects of application development today. Thus our headline "Deployment is King!" Read More >>