Tag Archives: build

QCon London 0

I’ve been invited to speak on colleague Chris Read’s track at QCon London this March. The track itself is chock full of a number of experienced proffesionals (including two ex-colleagues) so I fully intend to raise my game accordingly. We’re lucky enough to have Michael T. Nygard speaking too, author of perhaps the best [...]

Build Pattern: Chained Continuous Build 0

One of the problems quickly encountered when any new team adopts a Continuous Build is that builds become slow. Enforcing a Build Time Limit can help, but ultimately if all of your Continuous Build runs as one big monolithic block, there are limits to what you can do to decrease build times.
One of the [...]

Build Pattern: Build Time Limit 2

Anyone who has worked in a team which uses a Continuous Build inevitably starts to learn about the cost of a long running build:

More time between checkin and a report of a failure
Higher chance of Continuous Build containing multiple checkins, increasing the chance of an integration break and complicating rollback
Fixing a build related to [...]

Build Pattern: Movable Checkin Gate 2

The Checkin Gate defines a set of tests which need to pass before a developer checks in. Typically, the tests are a subset of the total test suite – selected to provide a good level of coverage, whilst running in a short space of time.
There is an inherent trade-off with a Checkin Gate though – [...]

A Brief And Incomplete History Of Build Pipelines 2

Recently, both Paul Julius and Chris Read pointed out that I was perhaps the first person to document the concept of build pipelines, at least in terms of how it relates to continuous integration and the like. As it turns out, the original posts on the subject are from further back than I remember:

An Introduction [...]