Automatic Project Creation

One technique that we are seeing more and more often with larger customers is the automatic creation of projects. This core idea of this approach is to develop a very consistent way of implementing the life-cycle for a class of projects so that adding a new project requires only a handful of changes from a previous project. These values might be things like build target, source control information, and numbering information.

Historically, teams that were doing this well would copy the existing project, trim out old, unneeded branches and make the handful of changes needed. Five or ten minutes later they had a new project ready to build for the first time. Pretty good, but not good enough for everyone.

Some groups are automating this process using the AnthillPro API. Some are using the operational projects introduced in 3.5 to do this. An operational workflow that takes a template project from a drop down, and then prompts for the values that change project to project. Other teams came to AnthillPro with project description files of one sort or another, that they parse and use to create projects using the remote scripting API. Others are using XML files that they've created to do the same thing. Some are using a combination of techniques. A source control trigger like the ones that start builds are used to start a configuration workflow whenever a new XML file is dropped into source control. The file is picked up, parsed out and then a new project is created based on it's contents.

Automatic project creation is a very nifty trend, but is it needed in order to be successful with AnthillPro? No. Not at all, but getting the project configurations consistent enough so that automatic project creation would be possible is absolutely a goal worth pursuing.