Chapter 7. Understanding Team Build
This chapter covers
- Team Build under the hood
- Creating a source code submission service
- Distributed builds
The act of creating executable builds is the culmination of all the work that goes into the software development process. As such, this often-neglected step requires careful attention in order to deliver high-quality software to customers. Given the complexities of enterprise software—co-development by geographically distributed teams and dependencies on myriad external components, systems, and services—it’s become even more important to frequently create dependable builds. Furthermore, given the availability of multiple platforms and processors (for example, 64-bit machines), the executables may need to be tweaked for target runtime environments. To create efficient and error-free builds, you also need to optimally configure the build machines with appropriate hardware, operating systems, service packs, compilers, and so on. After the build binaries are generated from the source files, a battery of build verification tests (BVTs) needs to be run to determine software quality. Builds validate the business requirements, assumptions, and expectations. From a process point of view, the automated build step needs to be an integral part of your software development methodology, not just an afterthought.