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build-processbuild-automation

Looking for a strong Build Management system

My team works on a Medium sized product which takes about 2 hours to build on a single dual-core machine. As part of an effort to improve productivity I am looking for alternatives to improve our build process.

Currently we build C++ code and .NET code using VS2005 solutions, we also have some legacy code built using makefiles and we pack the products using installshield. We also have unit tests written in UnitTest++, Nunit, CPPUnit and some tests that we wrote ourselves without any testing framework. Everything is coordinated by a set of Perl scripts that we wrote.

I am looking for a product, or a suite of products, or a bunch of non-related products that will allow me to do the following:

  1. Improve building time. I tried Incredibuild for parallelizing the build with some success. I will be happy to find more alternatives (cheaper ones???)

  2. Improve the build process definition. I need something to replace our complicated perl scripts with something that will allow me to define the build process easily.

  3. Improve our ability to discover problems in the build (maybe a web interface for looking at build outputs, highlight compilation errors, gather statistics on build times and build failures etc.

  4. Any other nice features that can help us improve our build management.

Solution

  • Sakin,

    I think you may be looking for two different tools - although occassionally you will find them packaged together.

    One tool would be the build management system that schedules the builds, shows you the outputs, gathers statistics, etc. Tools like FinalBuilder, CruiseControl and AnthillPro play in that space.

    The other tool would be the one that tears apart your build into parallelizeable pieces and speeds the build. Incredibuild is pretty good at what they do in that respect and certainly cheaper than some alternatives. There are free options built into some of the open source tools like gmake, but my understanding is that you'd need to do some pretty serious work to get that to work with solution files.

    You should be able to mix and match at will. We have customers using Anthill with Incredibuild, gmake, and a number of other build speeding tools.