Lastly, we’ll discuss the requirements for a build tool that would fulfill the needs of modern-
day project automation.
1.1 Life without project automation
Going back to Tom and Joe’s predicament, let’s go over why project automation is such a no-
brainer. Believe it or not, lots of developers face the following situations. The reasons are
varied, but probably sound familiar.
My IDE does the job. At Acme, developers do all their coding within the IDE, from
navigating through the source code, implementing new features, compiling and
refactoring code, to running their unit and integration tests. Whenever new code is
developed, they press the Compile button. If the IDE tells them that there’s no
compilation error and the tests are passing, they check the code into version control
so it can be shared with the rest of the team. The IDE is a powerful tool, but every
developer will need to install it first with a standardized version to be able to perform
all of these tasks, a lesson Joe learns when he uses a new feature only supported by
the latest version of the compiler.
It works on my box. Staring down a ticking clock, Joe checks out the code from
version control and realizes that it doesn’t compile anymore. It seems like one of the
classes is missing from the source code. He calls Tom, who’s puzzled that the code
doesn’t compile on Joe’s machine. After discussing the issue, Tom realizes that he
probably forgot to check in one of his classes, which causes the compilation process to
fail. The rest of the team is now blocked and can’t continue their work until Tom
checks in the missing source file.
The code integration is a complete disaster. Acme has two different developme
nt
g
roups, one specializing in building the web-based user interface and the other
working on the server-side backend code. Both teams sit together at Tom’s computer
to run the compilation for the whole application, build a deliverable, and deploy it to a
web server in a test environment. The first cheers quickly fade when the team sees
that some of the functionality isn’t working as expected. Some of the URLs simply
didn’t resolve or resulted in an error. Even though the team had written some
functional tests, they did not get exercised regularly in the IDE
.
T
he testing process slows to a crawl. The quality assurance (QA) team is eager to get
their hands on a first version of the application. As you can imagine, they aren’t too
happy about testing low-quality software. With every fix the development team puts
into place, they have to run through the same manual process. The team stops to
check new changes into version control, a new version is built from an IDE, and the
deliverable is copied to the test server. Each and every time, a developer is fully
occupied and can’t add value to the company otherwise. After weeks of testing and a
successful demo to the investor, the QA team says the application is ready for
primetime.
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