Helixsoft

Joel said it best – Daily Builds are your friend.

A continuous build system is quality control for a program that’s being developed. It’s a computer that tests the state of the program every day. Or preferably every ten minutes. Under my desk I have a computer whose sole job it is to continuously monitor the state of PathVisio. Does it compile correctly? Are there any style problems in the source code? Are the automated tests positive? Fresh documentation is automatically generated and uploaded. The webstart version is refreshed. A fresh zip archive is created and placed in a convenient place. If there are any problems, an email is sent to our mailing list. There is an online report where you can find out everything about the current health of PathVisio.

The real effect of a preventive measure is always hard to tell. It’s like fire prevention measures. They are costly, yet most houses won’t need them because they’ll never burn to the ground. Setting up a good continuous build system is quite a bit of work. Is it just red tape, a lot of effort but YAGNI?

Here is an example of how it saved us. After I hooked up Helen’s summer-of-code project to the continuous build system, we soon got a ton of errors by email. It turns out that she started using GroupLayout, a java class that is only available in Java 6 and higher. However, unbeknownst to Helen, both Cytoscape and PathVisio aim to be compatible with Java 5, and I configured the build system to check for Java 5 compatibility. So we found out about this problem right away, and Helen could fix the problem immediately before going too far down a dead-end road. It would probably have taken a lot more work to fix this if we had found out later.

For PathVisio we’ve used a continuous build system since day one. But recently I’ve taken the time to make quite a few improvements. I plan to write about that in more detail in the coming days.

Edit:here is part 2

Tags: continuous build, development, pathvisio

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 25th, 2009 at 12:07 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.