The Build Doctor - Latest Comments

Re: Outsourcing Continuous Integration

Auction Micro Brewry Equipment — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 03:42:09 -0000

Are micro machines worth anything?
I got some old micro machines out of a box my husdand got from a auction. I was wondering how I find out if they are worth anything.

Re: Ant Best Practices: The Clean Test

builddoctor — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 02:05:37 -0000

IIRC, Ant will look for an XML file in it's classpath for this. You'd need
to tell me what the actual problem is, as this message is probably a red
herring.

Re: Ant Best Practices: The Clean Test

sudheendra — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 01:57:33 -0000

where can i find antlib.xml file since the same message is appearing as ....... [antlib:org.apache.tools.ant] Could not load definitions from resource org/apache/tools/ant/antlib.xml. It could not be found.

Re: Continuous Integration in the cloud: good idea?

builddoctor — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 18:50:11 -0000

Tim, I'd be fascinated to see if anybody is doing this. Perhaps the speed issue isn't a concern given the potential cost savings :)

Re: Continuous Integration in the cloud: good idea?

Tim — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 05:39:00 -0000

Good point about speed, and they do have very limited test harnesses and testing. The deployment model for SAP could also be a challenge. I had in mind using Michael Feathers' approach to wrapping the tests around the legacy + some simplistic record/replay testing at quite a high level of granularity.

I know that it doesn't sound very exciting, but there is a lot of money here, eg SAP estimate 95% hosting savings from moving to Cloud based platforms, and, as things stand, customers are locked in to whatever the original implementation was based on (dbms + h/w), with the big SIs charging $MM just to validate a new platform.

I'll see if they've got any plans themselves.

Re: Continuous Integration in the cloud: good idea?

builddoctor — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 18:34:33 -0000

Tim,

I'm terrible at mixing metaphors so I won't chip in there. I'm not aware of much action with COTS software. Clearly you can drive a shell script to do all this but to my mind it's the glacial pace of some products and lack of tests that make CI challenging in that environment. Thanks for the comment.

Re: Going on a Cruise: ThoughtWorks Studios rebrands their CI server

Igor Brejc — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 08:11:47 -0000

I'm not sure Go is a good choice for rebranding. These days anything that has trouble being searched through search engines like Google is bad choice. The word "go" is just too omnipresent and nondistinctive.

Re: 6 Big Visible Continuous Integration Tools

Rene Medellin — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 02:56:20 -0000

Brand new-ish Wallboards for JIRA (fetching information from your Bamboo build agents but should be able to work with other CI servers as well)

http://blogs.atlassian.com/dev...

Re: When to use Maven

Stuart Grimshaw — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 09:21:27 -0000

I wrote up my experiences of migrating some legacy builds to Maven from Ant. It started off hard work, but the benefits now are totally worth it.

http://stubblog.wordpress.com/...

Re: Hosted Continuous Integration: Run Code Run

MikeCI — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 06:32:56 -0000

MikeCI is a hosted CI service, using Amazon EC2. Plus they're keen on OS projects!

http://www.mikeci.com

Re: Continuous Integration in the cloud: good idea?

Tim — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 16:15:51 -0000

I've heard of an 800lb gorilla metaphor for a dominant market supplier, and an elephant in the room as a metaphor for a big issue that people pretend to ignore, but never before an 800lb gorilla in the room. Did he scare away the elephant?

(it must be a male gorilla as females are much smaller).

Enough flippancy :-)

Are you aware of any CI techniques that work for COTS packages? I'd love to put Oracle or SAP business suites under CI so that I could replatform them more easily.

Re: Ant Best Practices

Java Interview Resources — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 23:33:12 -0000

Very useful writeup..Thanks.

Re: Going on a Cruise: ThoughtWorks Studios rebrands their CI server

Jez Humble — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 15:36:51 -0000

Thanks for the write up, although perhaps inevitably I'd argue with your statement that we've "had to play catch-up". On the contrary, I think we redefined the space with pipelines, and now you're starting to see some of the competition belatedly try and play catch up with us: http://forums.atlassian.com/th...

We've actively avoided trying to copy what others are doing: there's only one other product on the market with environment management functionality as powerful as ours, and I guarantee that when you see our test intelligence functionality, it will blow you away.

Thanks,

Jez.

Re: When to use Maven

EJ Ciramella — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 22:04:10 -0000

I agree 100%.

One of the other sticking point is poorly designed code it's trying to build resulting in dependencies on things there should never be.

For example, you should never put a dependency from a library to the jar portion of a war project.

Re: When to use Maven

Chris Melikian — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 03:21:42 -0000

I'd say one of the biggest problems with using Maven is if you don't follow Maven conventions to the letter. The second you start doing things your way you'll bog yourself down in XML hell and cute Maven workarounds (like the Maven Ant plugin) to get things done.

Spend some time to ensure that your projects follow the Maven conventions BEFORE you convert to Maven build scripts and you'll find it a lot easier.

Re: 6 Big Visible Continuous Integration Tools

David Ron — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 16:04:21 -0000

Also, check out Big Visible Cruise Web, a clone of Big Visible Cruise that runs in the web browser:

http://code.google.com/p/big-v...

Re: Outsourcing Continuous Integration

The Build Doctor — Mon, 31 May 2010 17:39:34 -0000

Hello again! One of my customers has to comply with not only his own regulatory environment, but those of his customers. They'll regularly send auditors around to make sure that there's no realistic potential for fraud in the development process. So, yes they may be paranoid, but it's probably not a paranoia that can easily be treated. VPN access may help some.

Re: Continuous Integration in the cloud: good idea?

The Build Doctor — Mon, 31 May 2010 17:36:34 -0000

Thanks Krzysztof. Agree that there's many ways to get around objections to CI in the cloud.

The performance of a build is both situational and subjective. Situational in that it depends on the platform, build tool, and project. Subjective in that some people really, really want to know right now if the build passed, and some don't even notice :)

Re: Outsourcing Continuous Integration

Krzysztof Choma — Fri, 28 May 2010 09:41:04 -0000

Disclaimer: I'm working for company that provides CI on Cloud to enterprises.

Having some experience in the subject, I'd like to remove two myths :)

Slava, you are right that virtualized EC2 environment is not good for CI. However for example Bitbar provides pretty fast CI on the Cloud - simply the machines are not virtualized! And you can easily add more machines if you have many long-running builds.

A comment on the security of outsourcing CI.
You can get exclusive VPN access to the cloud, so that even your CI provider wouldn't be able to access your data on the Cloud. Moreover, the machines holding the data wouldn't be able to access or get accessed from the internet in any way. I think that this level of security is more than enough for most of the 'paranoids' mentioned in the article.

Re: Continuous Integration in the cloud: good idea?

Krzysztof Choma — Thu, 27 May 2010 08:26:25 -0000

Disclaimer: I work for Bitbar, a company which delivers CI on the Cloud.

Fast CI needs strong hardware, so as someone already mentioned EC2 will not work, as it is virtualized. Fortunately there are tens of other Cloud vendors, with offers that better suit this purpose. Now, having the right HW on the Cloud, you don't need to worry about build and test times any more. Well, if necessary you can even make your process parallel, to make it even faster (this of course may require changes to your build/test scripts).

The communication overhead with the Cloud is low, as you only supply the latest source code changes to the Cloud - which is not very much data. So, at the end you get the build/test feedback very quickly after commit and you don't have to invest in the infrastructure.

If getting notifications, browsing test reports, logs and other build artifacts from the Cloud doesn't satisfy you and you just have to download huge amounts of half-products to your office, then you can use one of the caching solutions which will download the files to the right place before you discover the need of using them. Actually I should say 'download to the right places' as currently many development teams are distributed.

Re: What rPath do

Mehdi — Wed, 19 May 2010 18:18:57 -0000

"model-driven .... lifecycle ... versioned controlled repo ..... deployment automation of software system..."

where have i heard this before? hmmmm.. oh yeah, here: http://bit.ly/a4xkOH
Need only to read the first half of the page.

Re: Git for Sysadmins – Stephen Nelson-Smith

The Build Doctor — Fri, 07 May 2010 15:04:02 -0000

@rasputnik - ah. I have that problem in the morning, too. I plan to make a video podcast, if I ever find the time.

Re: Git for Sysadmins – Stephen Nelson-Smith

rasputnik — Fri, 07 May 2010 02:26:45 -0000

I meant no slides (sorry, pre-coffee commenting is always a bad idea).

Re: Git for Sysadmins – Stephen Nelson-Smith

The Build Doctor — Fri, 07 May 2010 01:52:47 -0000

What do you mean, no video? making a podcast is on my list.

Re: Git for Sysadmins – Stephen Nelson-Smith

rasputnik — Fri, 07 May 2010 01:31:21 -0000

Looks good - since there's no video, would be ideal if you could put up an audio-only version (for the 'podcast commuters' among us)