Improving Your Build Process

Question

Or, actually establishing a build process when there isn\'t much of one in place to begin with.

Currently, that\'s pretty much the situation my group faces. We do web-a

Answer 1

Our build process is a bunch of homegrown Perl scripts that have evolved over a decade or so, nothing fancy but it gets the job done. One script gets the latest source code, another builds it, a third stages it to a network location. We do desktop application development so our staging process also builds install packages for testing and eventually shipping to customers.

I suggest you break it down to individual steps because there will be times when you want to rebuild but not get latest, or maybe just need to re-stage. Our scripts can also handle building from different branches so consider that also with whatever solution you develop.

Finally we have a dedicated build machine that rebuilds the trunk and maintenance branches every night and sends out an email with any problems or if it completed successfully.