One of the hot ideas in the continuous integration space is the idea of a build pipeline. The idea of a build pipeline or staged build has been around for some time. To keep the build fast, include only a minimum amount of stuff outside the compile and link phases. After build notifications have gone out, run secondary tests to more throughly examine the build. The idea is to provide rapid, useful feedback on build health while still regularly running slower processes.

In this article, we take a careful look at two metaphors for build and release processes. The "Build Pipeline" and the "Build Lifecycle" and evaluate the strengths and limitations of each hopefully leading to a better understanding of the tricks in build and release management.

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Distributed deployments offer a wide variety of benefits to your applications lifecycle.  While automating this process saves time and reduces errors, it would be impossible to plan for every setback.  The following entry discusses how to determine which agents were skipped during deployment, and offers a solution for a quick redeploy.

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AnthillPro allows users to write scripts in JSR approved languages where they need to perform advanced customizations of behavior. This post points users to a repository of scripts to browse and highlights some examples.

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