Over at the CMCrossroad's Community blog , Julian Simpson (aka the build doctor) points out that IT shops tend to have developers, testers, release managers and sys admins working in separate silos which contributes to waste. I would add that it contributes to misery as well.

One of my favorite aspects of AnthillPro is that it tends to get everyone using the same tool while providing audited automation. This tends to help teams break down the walls in silos. The hard work is still interpersonal. 

As we covered in our recent webcast on automated deployments, manual deployments are pretty obviously inferior to automated deployments. And yet, as an industry we still have a lot of manual deployments. This counter-intuitive fact demands explanation. Conway's Law provides one.

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Every developer has done it. We just needed a bit of XML parsing or a better utility for dealing with connections. So we downloaded a library, stuck it in our code base and used it. It feels good, but reusing software without testing and managing it is risky. This article presents a strategy for managing reuse.

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We've made our last two Webinars available for playback at your convenience.

• Death to Manual Deployments: Manual deployments are slow, inconsistent and fail in production. Other than that, they're fine. Listen to Jeffery Fredrick and Eric Minick as they discuss what's wrong with Manual Deployments, why Automated Deployments are better and best practices for building on automation.
• Build and Deployment Automation for the Lean Economy: Teams today are challenged by the need to get much more done without dramatically increasing headcount. Join Jeffery and Eric as they share techniques for applying tools from Lean manufacturing to the build and deployment processes.

Jeffery and I have recieved a deluge of requests for replays of our latest Webinar. We have a little processing to do, but it will be made available and we will post a link from here. We expect to have it to you guys by Tuesday at the latest. Thanks for all the great feedback and enjoy your weekends!

When it comes to builds, we often talk about build types - a development build, an integration build, a release build, etc. We very rarely hear people talking (or writing) about build promotions.

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With the new website, the presentations below have (at least temporarily) lost their home. So, they are being archived for the time being here.

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We released an EJB benchmark in early 2002 based on some work we did early on with EJBs. With the new site design, the EJB benchmark would have been lost, and that's why it ended up on my blog for archiving.

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Given that I work for a company that develops an automated build management server, I get to hear about some of the different build and release processes that are in use. Generally, they all follow the same structure, but there are some variations. In this month's column, I would like to present that general structure and talk a little about some of those variations.

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In my previous post, I wrote about the evils of sloppy deployments. Two main practices may lead to what I call "sloppy deployments," they are ...

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