The bulk of this clinic will be run as a series of 30 minute hands-on lessons, where every student will be invited to complete a particular assignment. At the end of the 30 minutes, the instructors will demonstrate assignment completion and discuss. Prior to beginning the lessons, the instructors discuss the topic in some detail and encourage audience participation to get a feel for the current level of experience. By the end of the session, the students will have refactored an existing suboptimal build framework into one that demonstrates the principles being discussed, all running on their laptops.

This session focuses on 4 primary workshops:

• Machine Independence
• Portability/Boostrapping (committing all tools to source control)
• Adding Static Checking
• Adding Static Metrics

This session focuses on those developers that have been given the task of taking on the build automation responsibilities and are new to the topic, but probably have some experience with Ant builds. This session will also be of interest to experienced developers who have felt the pain of a bad build environment.

We expect that some attendees will just work on the prepared exercises while others will be seeking advice and support on their own build scripts.

Paul (me@pauljulius.com) is one of the CruiseControl project originators. Jeffrey (jtf@jeffreyfredrick.com) was an early user of the project and has been a long time committer. They work together through their joint effort, http://the.ci-guys.com. The material included in this session is scaled down from their 3 day intensive Build Engineering Bootcamp.