an agile approach to automated builds sela

© Copyright SELA software & Education Labs Ltd. 14-18 Baruch Hirsch St.Bnei Brak 51202 Israel 2

What is Build Automation?

Feedback Cycle Time

Agile Approach in Build Automation

Example Build Processes

Summary

• ‘The act of scripting or automating … tasks that software developers do in their day-to-day activities …’

(Wikipedia)

• Often includes, but is not limited to:

– Compilation

– Tests (unit, integration, functional, etc.)

– Preparation of installation packages

– Deployment to staging and/or production servers

– Others


• Benefits of build automation:

– Reduce human errors when manually building

– Have a single ‘authoritative’ source for the product

– Let people focus on creative things!

– Let QA ‘pull’ builds when they are ready

IMPROVE PRODUCT QUALITY!


• Daily/Nightly Build

– Runs at a scheduled time in the day, automatically

– Builds the entire product from scratch

– Runs tests, builds installer packages, etc.

– May take hours

• Continuous Integration (CI) Build

– Runs many times during the day

– Triggered by check-in operations

– Compiles the code, maybe run some sanity or smoke tests

– Should take several minutes at most



Minutes Hours Days

CI

Nightly / Daily

• Short Feedback Cycles:

– Individual Teams

– Fine-grained business components

– Run only small subset of unit tests, keep build fast! (<10 minutes)

• Long Feedback Cycles:

– Entire Products

– Build from scratch on dedicated machine

– Run all tests, including automated functional tests


• A combination of 3 consecutive build stages

• Stage 1:

– Compilation, unit tests

– Short feedback cycle

• Stage 2:

– Integration tests and/or acceptance tests

– Longer feedback cycle

• Stage 3:

– Functional tests and installation packages

– Longest feedback cycle



Time

Stage 1

Stage 2

Stage 3

QA

11

Identify the feedback cycle you want for each of your build types

Use multiple build types together for covering all feedback cycles

Iterate!

© Copyright SELA software & Education Labs Ltd. 14-18 Baruch Hirsch St.Bnei Brak 51202 Israel

an agile approach to automated builds sela

Technology

baruch hirsch st

bnei brak

dailynightly build

benefits of build automation

smoke tests

compilation tests unit

small subset of unit

entire product