I have come up with a few questions you should ask yourself if your build is up to snuff.
- Does it take longer than 10 minutes to setup a new computer to build a project?
- Are there only a one or two people who know how to completely setup a new computer?
- Do builds sometimes fail on the integration server when they are passing on your development machine?
- Do you often make cross-repository commits?
- Does building a subproject force you to build several other subprojects?
- Does it take longer than 2 minutes to checkout a new project and build it successfully?
- Is it possible for other developers (or other external factors) to break your development build without checking in code?
- Can you use any IDE with your project?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, perhaps you should spend some time refactoring your build and/or project structure. A nasty build can be very frustrating for developers yet is an oft overlooked part of development.
#1 by Russ White at July 10th, 2010
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Unfortunately my experience is that many entrenched and “vested” developers feel that because they have grown used to a certain work pattern or set of builds held together with haywire and spit that everyone else should just adapt to it.
Unfortunately most of the builds I have walked into by your very apt definition – well suck.
You should be able to get any single project and simply build it. To me this is the goal every project build should shoot for. And there is no good reason it cannot be hit.