We currently have a big Maven 2 project that is rather a collection of many single standalone projects with complicated dependencies, with the exception of some common parent POMs for building. In the end we always have to ship the application as one piece, so I would rather like to convert it to one or a few big projects.
Does anyone have experience in how to optimize continuous integration builds for big projects. Is the incremental build functionality of Maven or Hudson any good? I would prefer not to wait always 2 hours when having made only a small change in one module.
On the other hand, to be sure, you always would have to rebuild and re-test at least all direct and indirect dependencies of a changed module. That is also what we are currently doing with Hudson, triggering automatically all dependent jobs.
Does a split up into multiple build jobs for the same project pay off? I generally do not like to have artifacts on the server where all the other generated stuff like reports, docs, etc. could possibly be out of date.
Thanks for any thoughts.
I would highly suggest not to split up into different build jobs. This, in my experience, can get out of hand quickly with upstream and downstream dependencies. Incremental building works great for what you need it for. If the dependencies are set directly only artifacts that change and their dependencies are rebuilt.
I would split up the build jobs though if they are completely separate applications with no or very few dependnecies (if thats true then they shouldn't be under the same reactor and thus the incremental builds would not be possible)