Whitepapers

OpenMake Meister releases the power of software builds delivering speed, transparency and repeatability across the application lifecycle.   Meister saves time and money by shortening development cycles and consolidating what would normally be time consuming redundant tasks.  Meister's delivers 100% automation in both build and workflow processing.  Meister integrates with build engines to create synchronized pre-commit, continuous integrations and team builds for today's quickly changing development environment.  Through build automation, developers can maximize on feed back loops and accelerate builds for multiple languages including C/C++ and Java.  Meister integrates with more IDEs and ALM products than any of its competitors.

This paper seeks to get at the true nature of Continuous Integration and Build Management by
decomposing each practice into its constituent elements and examining the repercussions thereof. We will demonstrate that while Continuous Integration and Build Management share many superficial similarities, when it comes to the core of each practice there are significant differences. Understanding these differences is required to implement each practice in a meaningful manner as opposed to just going through the motions.

But that goal forms only a part of our motivation. In addition, we aim to clear up the emergent
confusion in recent literature, discussions, and vendor materials regarding Build Management and Continuous Integration. And once that confusion is cleared, we believe that each practice may serve as a guidepost for the evolution of thought within our industry. To help us as we formulate our discussion, we will start with a brief description of what is meant by
Build Management and Continuous Integration. We will then examine each practice and its activities in light of purpose, traceability requirements, treatment of source code, and relationship with artifacts.

The creations of software developers are works of art, delivering new capabilities that make life easier for end users. Yet all too often, the development process itself is a mess—particularly when the work of many individuals must be synchronized and integrated. Hudson, an open source “continuous integration” (CI) server initially developed at Sun, brings a new level of efficiency and productivity to collaborative software development. By automating the build-and-test process, Hudson saves time, cuts errors and risks, and brings a higher level of transparency to projects. This paper describes the capabilities of Hudson, compares Hudson’s key features to those of competitive offerings, and summarizes why Hudson has quickly become the industry’s most widely adopted open source CI server.

Evaluating Continuous Integration (CI) and Build Management (BM) servers may appear like a
straight forward proposition, but that can be deceiving. Having responded to well over 50 RFPs in the last 12 months alone, we recognize that the marketing checklist is one thing, and the operational needs of the team and enterprise are quite another. If you will soon be looking at CI and/or BM (perhaps beyond) for your organization, this paper can help you structure the right requirements for your need set, as well as help you produce an RFP that insures a quick ROI.

• CONTINUOUS INTEGRATION SERVERS
• BUILD MANAGEMENT SERVER FEATURES
• ENTERPRISE BUILD SERVER FEATURES

Summary:
This paper looks at the needs of build and release management, how those needs are met by open source and commercial tools that go way beyond the likes of Make or Ant, and the real costs of creating and maintaining a homegrown system.

About this Sponsor

Electric Cloud helps organizations to accelerate, automate, and analyze software production processes, thus improving engineering productivity, and speeding time to market. Electric Cloud products include ElectricAccelerator and ElectricCommander. ElectricAccelerator speeds up software builds by as much as 20X. ElectricCommander makes continuous integration and testing tasks more repeatable, more transparent, and more efficient across the enterprise—even across multiple locations and platforms.

In good economic times teams attempt bold experiments that promise to take them to new heights of productivity. In lean times like these, few have the appetite for such speculative ventures. Any new investment needs to address immediate pain and show immediate payback. But the pace of demands hasn’t slowed and the ever increasing need to do more continues. For build and release teams the demands come from all directions. The shorter cycle times of Agile means more builds, more deployments and more releases. The adoption of SOA means more complexity and more elements to juggle. The move to global, round-the-clock 24-hour development means more teams to service and less downtime. And in this economy adding headcount is likely not an option. Instead you’re told to get Lean and Mean. But how do you get to Lean and Mean without being stretched too thin? This need to keep costs fixed while adding capacity makes improving efficiency key. Instead of attempting a wholescale change to how you develop software we will take an idea from Lean Software Development and focus on reducing waste, allowing you to deliver more in the same time and for the same cost. Build and deployment automation offer fertile ground for dramatic productivity gains that will improve the efficiency of the entire team.

• Agile Development Challenges    
  
• Deployment Challenges    
  
• Build Acceleration Challenges    
  
• Integration with Elastic and Cloud Computing    
  
• Workflow Management