Armijn Hemel - Utrecht University

Using buildfarms to improve code

Paper (PDF) and Paper (TeX) and Slides (PDF)

Recent years have seen an explosion in software development. New and increasingly complex products are delivered at a faster pace than ever before and they are being developed in new and different ways. Development teams - especially Open Source teams - are spread across the globe. New techniques (for example "Extreme Programming") have started to transform the software development landscape.

A new set of support tools is needed for these new fast-moving and dynamic environments where development is rapid and finding bugs as soon as possible is crucial.

Build Farms can be used to assist this style of development. A "build farm" is a set of (mostly different) machines, that perform regular builds of and tests on a program (continuously, daily, hourly) and make a report with the status of the build or tests.

This talk will describe various build farm tools, analyze their strengths and weaknesses and describe the improvements that need to be made.