As a follow up to one of my previous posts 'Using Version Control for Home Development', I am now asking about opinions as regards using a Build Server for a pet project.
Lately I have been reading about this 'Build Servers' concept, and I have looked at applications such as Maven and CruiseControl.Net.
And thus I ask, how feasible is it to use something like CruiseControl.Net for my home pet projects?
Reason I ask is that I think that these Build Servers are mainly aimed for team projects...but then again, I'm still very new to this Automated Build process.
Keep in mind that most of the time, these pet projects are only handled by one man, not a team.
So should I look more into this concept for the sake of using at home, or should I just get some practice on it for experience's sake?
[EDIT]
Although I thank you all for your answers as regards alternatives to CC.Net and such, no one has yet really tackled the issue of whether it is feasible or not to implement a Build System for Home Development ?
It is completely feasible to implement a build server for your home projects. I've implemented CC.Net for my home projects myself and it is pretty easy to do so, even for the first time. I would say the learning curve (depending on your experience) is less than a day to get your first project up and building, though there is always the longer tail on that curve as you dig into some of the more interesting details.
The question to me is more one of the motivation for continuous integration on these projects. If you are using "Home Project" synonomous with "Throw-away Project", there probably isn't much point in going to the trouble of CI unless you are using it specifically as a CI learning excercise.
However, assuming these are not throw-away projects you are talking about, I've found (in addition to the more obvious benefits of automation) that implementing CI helps reduce the overhead involved in coming back to a project you've walked away from for some period of time. Of course, unit tests are the most valuable asset in this regard, but the combination of unit tests with an automated build/deployment process really allows you to focus on the new and changed requirements when you come back to a project after having set it down for a while.
Additionally, as mghie points out in the comments to this answer, "CI will give even greater benefit for home projects if they build upon each other, so changes in one project could cause the build to break in others."
My advice, just do it once so you have a clearer picture of what is involved and the benefits you might reap and drawbacks you might incur. Then make the decision for yourself as to whether or not it is worth continuing to do. Like I said, the learning curve is reasonably low so the investment you will have to make in just giving it a try shouldn't be the reason not to.
Nutshell: Feasible - Yes, Desirable for home projects - Quite Possibly, Worth further investigation - Definitely, Investment - Relatively low
As an alternative to CC.Net, I recommend you to give a look to TeamCity, is really easy to setup and get it up and running.
Related question:
Best Continuous Integration Setup for a solo developer (.NET)
i installed CC.net months ago it took me a whole night to configure it and create the xml configurations and i have no regrets about it, it smoothly integrates with SVN, Nunit, Nant or Msbuild. you should try it only if it is to gain experience
Take a look at Hudson its very easy. You need to just deploy in Tomcat or any other servlet you use container. Once up every configuration can be done using browser. Hudson supports maven, ant etc and supports all the major SCMs. I have been using hudson for the past one year and not faced any trouble.
CC.NET is very feasible, in fact with the free cost and wide ranging supported actions. Not to mention the fact that since you can get the source code you can modify it to you needs I could not imagine anything better. I read the other compliants about how difficult it is to set up, but to be honest I had my first simple TFS/VS2005 project up within an hour. Just remember if you run into any issues or snags CC.NET has a pretty active google groups for Users and Devs who would be willing to help you through any gotchas.
I love CC.NET and I'm a big fan of CI, but I have to ask: with only one developer on the project, what integration scenarios exist? Wouldn't you just build the entire project in Visual Studio, negating the need for CI?
I would agree that CC.NET is a great option for local/home development. I wanted to add that it does not require an SCM tool in order to make it work. There is a file system watcher plugin that will just monitor for a file change. That way you don't have to have a check-in in order for it to execute. Also you don't have to wait for the CI cycle to complete, it's much like having F6 run everytime except for the IDE doesn't use all it's resources, you can keep coding away. If it breaks, you can choose to investigate or just ignore. There is no one way to do CI.
If you do create unit tests, having that constantly execute against your code on every save certainly has some advantages in early problems. Using CCTray allows you to see it, but not be intruded upon. My 2 cents.
Finally, setting it up the first time can be a little tough, but you can tweak out a Visual Studio C# template or whatever you desire to automatically configure your CI setup with the least amount of information required by the user.
Related
We are currently using Jira 5.1.6 with GreenHopper 6.0.5. We have a lot of projects, probably about a dozen total but only a few that are actively worked on at a time, with the rest being there for occasional bugfixes or other tasks. The 4–5 developers in our company are likely to be working on a couple projects at once (some working on just one, some working on maintenance on several, and it somewhat varying who's working on what depending on the business priorities).
So, GreenHopper seems set up from a very project-centric view. I can set up a Rapid Scrum Board for a project, and make Sprints within it of work to do for that project. This can give the business a good view of work into that project. Potentially, one can also make a Board for all of the projects (since GreenHopper 6 added that), and make a kind of "global sprint" across everything. If we were to have this kind of global sprint, all of the project owners would need to work at once on figuring out what should get done over the next couple weeks, which might be workable, but seems a bit tricky and would require a lot of coordination.
What I think we want is some kind of "resource view" or something, so that project owners could set up their tasks in their sprints, but there's some sort of view for each developer to tell them what task they should be working on next no matter which project's sprint it's in, and some way for our manager to allocate our time across the projects. So, I might be scheduled to work, for example, 20 hours a week on project A, 10 on project B, and 10 on maintenance of other projects, and then project owners making sprints could see how much time they had allocated, and I as a developer would see some kind of unified view of my upcoming tasks, so that I would know what I should be working on next and what's coming soon. I don't know if that description is exactly what we want, but I think we want something along those lines, and it seems like we can't be the only place that wants some sort of project-based view as well as a resource-based view.
The thoughts I've had of how we might approach this from my exploration of GreenHopper so far are:
Create those "global" sprints I mentioned, and work as a department at the beginning of each sprint to try to schedule what we'll all be doing. Projects can get a look at their particular piece of the sprint using a Quick Filter or somesuch, and we just have to deal with coordinating those sprints.
Use the "Parallel Sprints" feature on an all-projects Board, and have each developer create their own sprints of the tasks they have coming up. This helps with getting a resource-based view, but is probably tough for projects to figure out status of things, and definitely feels like squeezing GreenHopper into a space that it really doesn't want to go.
Create a board for each project of the things to be coming up for each project, so each project gets its own Sprints and we get the project-based view of things, and just have each developer track themselves which projects' sprints they should be getting tasks from. Basically, just GreenHopper isn't the tool for a resource-based view, so don't even bother, and trust our developers and our manager to look across all these projects for what tasks to work from rather than trying to do it all in one place.
None of those seem great, though I'm sure we could make do with any of them. But I keep on coming back to that it doesn't feel like we're doing something bizarre or unique to us, and we would have thought that since Jira/GreenHopper was an industry-standard agile tool that it'd be easier to use it for what we're trying to do. Are we doing something crazy? I think we'd be fine with changing our process to use standard practices if there's a standard way of doing Agile across multiple projects out there. Is there some GreenHopper setting or report or something somewhere I've missed? Is there some other Jira plugin that we should be using instead of or in addition to GreenHopper? Do other teams out there use one of the above approaches and can give advice on whether or not it's a good idea?
Any help would be appreciated. Thank you.
"... seems a bit tricky and would require a lot of coordination." Yup, sounds like project management to me.
I'd create boards for each product that gets released on its own schedule. I'd also create a query to show each user the issues assigned to them sorted by Sprint so they can see what work is on their plate. The issues will be across multiple boards and sprints.
I do wish that GH helped with resource allocation more, including totaling up the time allocated in the filter in the previous paragraph. At the moment I end up exporting the results of the filter to Excel and using that to sum up totals by resource.
I asked this question in perhaps the more appropriate place, on the Atlassian forum:
https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/99020/how-do-i-use-greenhopper-to-manage-developers-across-multiple-projects
And I think the answer there from them was very good. I created a board for each project, limited to its project and used for creating that project's sprints, and the developers use an "All Projects" board to see all of the sprints that they're a part of.
Doesn't handle resource allocation wonderfully, as mdoar states, but it does seem to be using the tool the best way that it can be for this for now.
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Do you need a project management system if you work alone? I mean a project management system that includes issue tracking, wiki, etc.
Currently I keep my issues in a very good organizer software and I keep project documentation in Word files (and of course I have a version control system), so I am not really sure if I need a project management software, because I work alone.
One useful thing, I can think of, that project management system can additionally give me is linking issues with commits (UPDATE: I've found this feature useful enough: for example, right now I am creating documentation for the new release of my project and I consequently open every issue with "Pending for release" status, then I read the issue's description and then I can quickly view the diff of the commit for this issue - this helps me to see details and write better documentation).
Another one - sharing issues so your users or your employer can view or manage them.
What am I missing? Is project management software necessary when working as the only programmer?
UPDATE: I've thought up another useful thing: In comments we can give a link to an issue or a wiki article with detailed information about the code being commented.
You say you use some organizer software that helps you managing issues. So you already have your custom project management system. Just keep it.
Project management systems does not have to be big, support sharing data or other kinds of documentation. As a programmer you are supposed to use one to make your work organized, but it doesn't matter which one. You can happily use plain text files if they work for you.
Still, if there is even a slight chance that you'll be cooperating with someone, you should try something that allows cooperation... just to know how they work.
Do you need a project management system if you work alone?
Yes.
Currently I keep my issues in a very good organizer software and I keep project documentation in Word files (and of course I have a version control system).
See. You have a project management system. Why ask?
project management system can additionally give me is linking issues with commits.
That's not necessarily project management. You can easily do that with you version control software.
Read this: http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/issuetrackers.html
sharing issues so your users or your employer can view or manage them.
That means you're not working alone, if you're sharing something. What are you asking for here? How to share?
When working alone is the key thought to pursue here. When you are alone, you don't have the luxury of having someone else to keep you on your toes. A good "system" is essential therefore in order to help you manage your projects. As to which system to employ, that all comes down to your individual needs, and how much time you want to spend maintaining such a system.
If there is any possibility that you will need to involve someone else, then you need to decide if the system you use will scale to meet your changing requirements. This is also true if you continue to work alone and your workload changes.
As for software, that is almost another question entirely. I personally prefer to use a software tool to track all of my tasks, and to help me to collate data that helps me to determine priorities and task scheduling. That is in a nutshell what project management is all about. When working at home on my own projects, I use a simple Redmine configuration to manage different types of projects. Planning for programming projects, working out the logistics for my wedding, even managing my house renovations. All have been added to my private Redmine setup because I'm too lazy to try and keep paper-diary styled systems updated. At work, I have a more complex configuration to manage the myriad of programming projects we have here, and to manage the dependencies between them.
I've found though, that the most important thing is to ensure that the processes are streamlined, and that the supporting tool can be configured to match the processes. You don't want to have to change your processes because the tool isn't up to par. Also, the tool should not become the sole focus of all of your efforts, therefore it should be configured to reduce the "red-tape" side of things. You only want to capture enough information to describe your tasks, and to determine when they need to be done, who will do them, and when they are completed. Yes, your needs may require more information to be captured, but always try to minimise this, as you don't want to feel like you are always updating your project management tool when you'd rather be working on that latest killer algorithm you've been looking forward to doing! ;-)
I would not want to work without a system like trac anymore, even if I'm the only one working on the project. You should use a version control system of course, no question about that. Then there are two or three things coming up, you also mentioned.
First is documentation. There are lots of different possibilities and a wiki is just one of it. I personally use the wiki mostly for ideas, thoughts and notes. It's easy to put drawings in it, link to ressources in the web and really quickly edit. This can not replace in code documentation you do with source comments or tools like doxygen. And this can also not replace a manual, if the project requires one.
The second thing you'll come across is some kind of todos, let it be bug reports (even from yourself), feature requests, things like that. You can put them as comments in your code or use a list in a text file or your PIM system, but you can also use a ticket system, just to keep track of what you want to or have to do in the project in the future. You can not do everything just now.
Third is the bigger plan, this is not just atomic todos but things trac calls milestones. This has to be written down somewhere.
The great thing about trac now is, you can integrate all these thing you have to do anyway in one tool and even cross link between all the parts. Link to code lines from a ticket, reference tickets in a commit message, use ressources from your repository in the wiki, automatically build doxygen and integrate it and so on. You must decide if you want to use trac for all the things around your project or something else, but you have these things anyway so why not use a system integrating it all? ;-)
I mean a project management system that includes issue tracking, wiki, etc.
I don't use an Issue Tracker, but I practice continuous (not "big bang") integration, and I test (look for bugs) early and often, and I fix any bugs as soon as I find them, so that list of known Issues remains small.
I also have a lot of structure in the source code (e.g. separate projects/assemblies for separate components), so I try to have "the code is the documentation".
The table at What Types of Documents Should You Create? implies that you may not need documentation (e.g. a wiki), unless you're working with other people: e.g. with a manager, testers, and/or end-users.
You may be the only programmer now but will it stay that way forever? I often work alone on development projects but I still track the "to do" list and issues in a simple Access database. Makes it much easier if you need to expand/hand over a project.
You absolutely do, at least for a bigger projects that take a few months. For the past years I tried :
eclipse notepad plugin - just text file - effective
eclipse mylyn tasks - better, enough for one-man-show, but I was still having issues with migration between eclipse instances
youtrack is free and it's like a JIRA but more simple and practical for an individualist
With notepad I was able to focus on current task, but I wasn't able to maintain long term iterations, because without issue tracker I was loosing discipline, dealing with 3 tasks at the same time, not finishing them, etc.
We have an automated build server that builds our code nightly, which is useful for us since not everyone on our team can build the entire source tree. Lately, some members of the team are becoming more lax about fixing build errors promptly; sometimes weeks will go by without a successful build. I even overheard one developer say, "the build is already broken, now is a good time to add [some breaking change]." Since I work on the the code the furthest downstream, I am usually working with parts of the tree that are woefully out of sync with the source code repository, which makes it very difficult to test changes before I submit them.
I feel like we're losing most of the benefit of having a nightly build since it is continually broken. Am I way off base here, or should fixing the build be a higher priority?
Fixing the nightly build should be the highest priority. As you said, if they are broken, they have no value. If people wish to check in code that causes breakage, they should do this on a branch and only merge it in when it is tested.
Those devs clearly need to be kicked back into shape.
I'd suggest building at least a few times daily, if not upon checkins. And once you got a successful build cycle going again, have a go (in a joking way) at the person who broke the build - when it happens.
Everyone needs to take ownership of the codebase and take responsibility.
To be honest, it also is about having some pride in your craft. If ultimately people don't give a damn if the build is broken, and they don't after being asked to sort it out, it sounds they'd be better off doing some other job.
The longer you put off fixing it, the longer it will take to fix.
If it's fixed immediately, the things that cause it to be broken should be fresher in everyone's head. Breaking changes could also be piling up making it that much more of a headache to fix later.
It's critical to get it fixed. The longer you put it off, the more things you're going to find later. How can someone tell if their changes have broken the build, if they don't start with a clean build?
Our standard is to have all our unit and functional tests run "green" on a neutral integration box after a commit. Of course, test-driven development is appropriate to our situation, but may not fit yours. If you're not even able to build the project, there are probably bad surprises lurking in previous commits.
If it's so big that the time it takes to build it is standing in the way of getting it fixed, techniques like breaking it up into smaller projects and continuous integration may help.
A friend of mine told me about his team that had the Zucchini of Doom. Anyone breaking the nightly build had to display the ZoD on their desk. This vegetable was in a fairly advanced state of decomposition, which sent out the message quite clearly that a broken build was not something to be tolerated.
If the team isn't motivated enough to keep the nightlies building then this is something that should be enforced/encouraged by the managers.
I've used source controls for a few years (if you count the Source Safe years), but am by no means an expert. We currently are using an older version of Sourcegear Vault. Our team currently uses a check out and lock model. I would rather switch to a update and merge model, but need to convince the other developers.
The reason the developers (not me) set up to work as check out and lock was due to renegade files. Our company works with a consulting firm to do much of our development work. Some years ago, long before my time here, they had the source control set up for update and merge. The consultants went to check in, but encountered a merge error. They then chose to work in a disconnected mode for months. When it was finally time to test the project, bugs galore appeared and it was discovered that the code bases were dramatically different. Weeks of work ended up having to be redone. So they went to check out and lock as the solution.
I don't like check out and lock, because it makes it very difficult for 2 or more people to work in the same project at the same time. Whenever you add a new file of any type or change a file's name, source control checks out the .csproj file. That prevents any other developers from adding/renaming files.
I considered making just the .csproj file as mergable, but the Sourcegear site says that this is a bad idea, because csproj is IDE auto-generated and that you cannot guarantee that two different VS generated files will produce the same code.
My friend (the other developer) tells me that the solution is to immediately check in your project. To me, the problem with this is that I may have a local copy that won't build and it could take time to get a build. It could be hours before I get the build working, which means that during that time, no one else would be able to create and rename files.
I counter that the correct solution is to switch to a mergable model. My answer to the "renegade files" issue is that it was an issue of poor programmer discipline and that you shouldn't use a weaker programmer choice as a fix for poor discipline; instead you should take action to fix the lack of programmer discipline.
So who's right? Is check in - check out a legitimate answer to the renegade file issue? Or does the .csproj issue far too big of a hassle for multiple developers? Or is Sourcegear wrong and that it should be ok to set the csproj file to update and merge?
The problem with update and merge that you guys ran into was rooted in a lack of communication between your group and the consulting group, and a lack of communication from the consulting group to your group as to what the problem was, and not necessarily a problem with the version control method itself. Ideally, the communication problem would need to be resolved first.
I think your technical analysis of the differences between the two version control methodologies is sound, and I agree that update/merge is better. But I think the real problem is in the communication to the people in your group(s), and how that becomes apparent in the use of version control, and whether the people in the groups are onboard/comfortable with the version control process you've selected. Note that as I say this, my own group at work is struggling through the exact same thing, only with Agile/SCRUM instead of VC. It's painful, it's annoying, it's frustrating, but the trick (I think) is in identifying the root problem and fixing it.
I think the solution here is in making sure that (whatever VC method is chosen) is communicated well to everyone, and that's the complicated part - you have to get not just your team on board with a particular VC technique, but also the consulting team. If someone on the consulting team isn't sure of how to perform a merge operation, well, try to train them. The key is to keep the communication open and clear so that problems can be resolved when they appear.
Use a proper source control system (svn, mercurial, git, ...)
If you are going to do a lot of branching, don't use anything less recent than svn 1.6. I'm guessing mercurial/git would be an even better solution, but I don't have too much hands-on-experience using those yet.
If people constantly are working on the same parts of the system, consider the system design. It indicates that each unit has too much responsibility.
Never, ever accept people to offline for more than a day or so. Exceptions to this rule should be extremely rare.
Talk to each other. Let the other developers know what your are working on.
Personally I would avoid having project files in my repository. But then again, I would never ever lock developers to one tool. Instead I would use a build system that generated project files/makefiles/whatever (CMake is my flavor for doing this).
EDIT: I think locking files is fixing the symptoms, not the disease. You will end up having developers doing nothing if this becomes a habit.
I have worked on successful projects with teams of 40+ developers using the update-and-merge model. The thing that makes this method work is frequent merges: the independent workers are continuously updating (merging down) changes from the repository, and everyone is frequently merging up their changes (as soon as they pass basic tests).
Merging frequently tends to mean that each merge is small, which helps a lot. Testing frequently, both on individual codebases and nightly checkouts from the repository, helps hugely.
We are using subversion with no check-in/check-out restrictions on any files in a highly parallel environment. I agree that the renegade files issue is a matter of discipline. Not using merge doesn't solve the underlying problem, what's preventing the developer from copying their own "fixed" copy of code over other people's updates?
Merge is a pita, but that can be minimized by checking in and updating your local copy early and often. I agree with you regarding breaking checkins, they are to be avoided. Updating your local copy with checked in changes on the other hand will force you to merge your changes in properly so that when you finally check-in things go smoothly.
With regards to .csproj files. They are just text, they are indeed mergeable if you spend the time to figure out how the file is structured, there are internal references that need to be maintained.
I don't believe any files that are required to build a project should be excluded from version control. How can you reliably rebuild or trace changes if portions of the project aren't recorded?
I am the development manager of a small company, only 3 programmers.
The projects we work on sometimes take weeks and we employ the big bang, shock and awe implementation style. This means that we have lots of database changes and program changes that have to work perfectly on the night that we implement. We checkout a program, change it and set it aside because implementing it before everything else will make 20 other things blow up. I am for check out and lock. Otherwise, another person might change a few things not realizing that program has had massive changes already. And the merge only helps if you haven't made database changes or changes to other systems not under source control. (Microsoft CRM, basically any packaged software that is extensible through configuration)
IMO, project files such as .csproj should not be part of the versioning system, since they aren't source really.
They also almost certainly are not mergeable.
What is the initial cost of setting up CruiseControl?
The key point here is not the time you have to invest in setting up CruiseControl. You can do this in an hour or so. The question is weather do you have a code repository (SVN, TFS) and a build script ready (something - MSBuild script or so - that will clean, rebuild, test and deploy your app). If not you will have to invest some time in that - depending on how complicated your project is - but surely it will take a lot more time than setting up a CruiseControl server.
Not more than two to three hours worth if you're new to it. The first time I used it I had something that checked out the latest version from subversion, compiled it using MSBuild and then upload it in less than that time.
I'd recommend Hudson over CruiseControl any day of the week. I can't think of anything CruiseControl can do which Hudson doesn't do (better). Especially the web-based frontend is far superior. You can run Hudson directly on your machine (using JNLP) and have your project setup in minutes.
It takes a little while to get it up and running - but you can get a solution to build using the task to build you .sln file in less than a day if you're a complete newbie on the subject.
It gets a little more complicated when you add unit testing in various frameworks, costumizing the dashboard, labelling your builds etc but it's a matter of days, not weeks to get anything up and running.
Software - free.
Hardware - cost depends. If you only want to run nightly it can probably share server space with something else. We use a dedicated server with builds every 15 mins.
Set up time - Once learnt you're looking at a few hours to set up a new server. If you're new to CC allow a day or two.
If you've never used an integration server before you're going to have a learning curve for the entire team - allow a few weeks.
We've recently moved to a new server and we set up a fresh installation - it took a few hours. That's for four projects, two different source control providers, and includes custom tasks like reporting and building help files.
I'd recoccomend a dedicated machine for cruise control, it doesn't have to be amazingly powerful but bear in mind it had to be able to compile your code.
We used an old developer's machine, which was put aside after an upgrade.
As far as the cost in time a day should have you up and running.
How do you define 'cost'? It's free to download so there's no monetary cost.
In terms of time it should take between 1/2 - 1 day, depending on how complicated your configuration is.
If you have a simple project with no dependencies then a couple of hours. If you are actually doing 'integration' of many projects with many dependencies then several weeks and possibly code changes. IMHO CC.Net doesn't scale well to large numbers of projects...
You should be able to set it up in about 3 hours and it's totally free.
Still you can spend money on external tools like Simian etc, but that's totally optional. Setting up CCnet really is a matter of going through the configuration documentation and that's it.
I blogged about my experiences with CCnet before: http://www.tigraine.at/2008/10/08/another-take-on-contiuous-integration/
Jay Flowers runs a project called CI Factory which enables you to put together a CruiseControl.NET installation with optional modules in no time at all.
http://jayflowers.com/joomla/
Also, you might wish to listen to the .NET rocks podcast interview with him:
http://www.dnrtv.com/default.aspx?showID=64