We recently cohosted a Webinar on Lean processes with our friends from AccuRev. Analysts from Forrester discussed trends in the market, and how companies are applying Lean principals to find efficiencies in their development and release efforts. The webinar was fantastic and we had more questions than we could get to live. Here are some of the questions that came back in to us that we wanted to answer or expand on.

Q: Setting up all that automation seems pretty intimidating when in the throes of projects.  How much setup time is usually required for a standard .Net/Windows environment?

A: Automating does require effort. However...(continued below the fold)

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Download our handy one page flyer to see how you rate on the four dimensions of our Enterprise Continuous Integration Maturity Model. This ECI MM has its roots in the CITCON session "CI Roadmap".

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Our latest webcast - Enterprise Continuous Integration Maturity Model - presented tools for deciding how mature your organization is with ECI and automation. We had a lot of great questions were weren't able to answer live. We're taking the time to answer them on the blog for anyone who's interested.

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Many software projects have dependencies at run time on other projects that are built and deployed by the software team. Some version of another application must be present in order to run properly. We see this situation appearing most often with Web Services, J2EE environments where EJB clients and applications must match, and even in the roll-out of related database schemas. This post reviews strategies for coordinating these deployments with AnthillPro.

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Andrew Binstock's latest column at SD Times examines the changing CI market. While Andrew makes some guesses as to how the market will shake out, I would rather focus on his views that the market has two major market segments - Enterprise Continuous Integration and work-group CI. This division is really key to understanding the current market.

Enterprise Continuous Integration

What I think Andrew leaves out in his analysis is that Enterprise Continuous Integration has a different core audience than work-group CI. Enterprise CI is less about the developer and more about the release engineer. While rapid CI feedback to the development team remains important, Enterprise CI seeks to integrate development with testing and operations. As ECI expands its concerns beyond development, features like security and traceability play a bigger role.

AnthillPro is one of three tools Andrew highlights as participating in the Enterprise CI space. While we compete against additional solutions from time to time, Andrew has pretty much highlighted the big players. Enterprise CI differs from work-group CI in two key ways. The first is the audience difference discussed above. The second is difference is scale. Enterprise CI is happy to move beyond a single team or department and caters to much larger organizations. While some small teams use AnthillPro independently, many of our customers have hundreds or thousands of engineers on a single AnthillPro instance.

Work-group CI

The work-group tier of CI is probably the most widely accepted area right now. At Urbancode, we know this space well. Since 2001 our old open source solution provided a work-group level solution and from 2002 to 2006 we had a commercial offering in this space. Today, open-source tools like CruiseControl, and Hudson make up much of this space but commercial tools like Bamboo, TeamCity, DrumBeat and many, many others add their own special features. An installation of a work-group class continuous integration server generally serves a development team or department. The main focus of these tools is providing rapid feedback to the developers about the state of the build. A secondary focus is on performing some build management and archiving the build.

Note: for a detailed breakdown on CI vs Build Management see our white-paper.
Despite my nitpicks, I think Andrew has hit the nail on the head in his article and recommend it.

Update: We've added a page on our main website discussion how AnthillPro differs from workgroup level CI tools.

One of the things that sets AnthillPro aside from open source and team level tools, is that it can handle very complex build processes. In this article, we look at a cross platform, multi-phase build and how it gets modeled in AnthillPro. While not the most complicated workflow in the world, it provides a good baseline for examining how to build somewhat complex workflows. Details are available in a video below the fold.

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In June, 2009 Urbancode will be sponsoring two webcasts. On June 18th in conjunction with CM Crossroads, we'll be presenting an Enterprise Continuous Integration Maturity Model. On the 23rd, we are sponsering a Forrester webcast, "Beyond Agile Processes - A Lean ALM Strategy".

Both events are free of charge. Details below the fold.

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Through the month of June, we'll be looking at some of the upcoming features in AnthillPro 3.7. First up is the integration with Klocwork Insight announced today at JavaOne.

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