Bad build practices take a hidden toll on teams. It is not uncommon for a new developer to take days or even weeks to establish a functioning workspace. Good build engineers can make all the difference. By treating the build framework with the same respect as other source code they can help prevent these problems. In this clinic we will show how to refactor your build approach to end up with sustainable practices that get new people up and running quickly and set the stage for long term productivity. While the workshops are in Ant, the concepts are portable.

In this session, we invite CI tool vendors to give a short demonstration of the best features of their tool. Each vendor will be given 10min to show off the best features of their software, with a further 5min of questions.

This will allow CI users to quickly get a good grasp on the plethora of CI tools on the market, to help them find out about useful features of various tools that may help their CI implementation, and to learn about the practices that each tool encourages.

It also helps CI tool vendors gauge the market, and improve the standards and features of all CI products.

We struggled with long-running, complex builds and difficulty in sharing code across multiple projects. We started using Maven to simplify our builds. This lead to many more benefits that we didn’t expect. It also minimized the overhead costs of extracting, introducing and maintaining new modules. This provided a path for us to move away from a few monolithic slow builds to many small, lightweight fast builds. Using conventions improved cross-team communication. Managing dependencies, versions and performing releases have all become trivial. Maven is a wonderful tool for enhancing agility.