Urbancode is pleased to announce version 3.6 of AnthillPro, a leading build and deployment automation server for the enterprise. AnthillPro provides continuous integration as well as support for activities like deployments, long running tests and releases that may occur after build time through management of a cloud of agent machines. AnthillPro supports development teams working with Java, Ruby, .Net and native technologies.

Major New Features In AnthillPro 3.6

• Improved support for geographic distribution. The server-agent communication layer has been reworked for better performance. The new approach also supports the use of a Relay Server that acts as a proxy for agents behind a firewall or in another location. Distributed web front ends can also be employed to improve responsiveness for users connecting over the WAN.
• Preflight builds. At the push of a button, preflight builds integrate the developer's changes with a snapshot of the latest source code, and then run a build in the build environment, not on the developer's machine. If a Preflight Build fails, the developer is immediately notified.
• Test and coverage trending and metrics. Discover test and coverage trends. Compare any two builds and see which tests and suites fail the most or take the longest. Or see if coverage is improving or decreasing.

New and Improved Integrations

• EMMA code coverage integration. Run EMMA and publish coverage reports with the EMMA integration. In addition, AnthillPro users can generate a coverage report for every project that uses EMMA.
• Mercurial integration. Set up AnthillPro projects that use the Mercurial repository to check out code, build, tag, and more.
• AccuRev integration expanded. AnthillPro can now automatically generate and manage a pool of AccuRev streams, making configuration and maintenance easier.
• Team Foundation Server 2005 and 2008 are now supported concurrently.
• Jira Integration updated. AnthillPro can now update issue status and leave a comment regarding what it did

Other Improvements

• Remote agent management. Agents can be restarted from the main UI.
• Easier view of source code changes across builds. Any two builds can be compared with AnthillPro listing the changes between them as well as changes to their dependencies.
• Copying projects, workflows and jobs has been made easier and more flexible.
• The types of user defined workflow properties can now be changed. Fields can also be marked as password fields.
• The My Builds page has been completely reworked. Build and requests have been merged to provide a cleaner, more easily understood interface.

Complete Release Notes


Thanks,

The AnthillPro Team

There is trouble on the horizon. It's crunch time, and your boss has nominated you to be in charge of deploying the companies new web application for automated functional testing. "No problem!" you exclaim. As you sit at your desk mapping out a strategy, it dawns on you that only 4 of the 20 QA machines support functional testing. How will you ensure that you deploy only to those machines? Relax. You have options.

Read more...

At a recent customer visit, we were asked how they could track not just who did a deployment and when, but also "why". AnthillPro doesn't know why you do the things you do, so we needed to add an input to the deployment workflow so that the deploying engineer could record why the deployment was taking place.

This short example shows how a workflow property can be used to automatically generate build life notes within AnthillPro.

Read more...