We noticed a new community AnthillPro blog started by Eric Starr: Anthillizer.com: AnthillPro Tips and Tricks.

In his first article Eric describes using a simple web form to easily test parametrized AnthillPro repository triggers. He ends up one step away from the world's simplest custom AnthillPro dashboard.

I checked in with Eric a few days ago and it sounds like he has a few more tips and tricks in the hopper and nearly ready to post. We're excited watch his site develop.

I'll be part of three sessions this week at Agile2009. The first is today (Wednesday), a joint session with Paul Julius from our Build Engineer Bootcamp: Builds as Code. PJ and I have a second session tomorrow (Thursday) on Creating Habitable Code. Finally I'll be part of a panel discussion on How to be really Awesome at Continuous Integration.

Also stop by the booth we are sharing with Accurev today or tomorrow and pick up a nice glossy version of our Elements of CI wallchart. We'll also happily share details on our upcoming 3.7 release.

Update! A recording of this webinar is now available: Watch Now

Next Wednesday on August 19th Eric and I will be presenting a webinar on Build and Deployment Automation for the Lean Economy. Our inspiration for the topic is that while we've seen budgets frozen by the economic slow down there hasn't been much of slow down in demands placed on build and release teams. As a result there's a lot more interest in improving efficiency, in getting more done with the same people, and this is a place build and deployment automation can make a big impact.

We're also interested in sharing some of the concepts of Lean Software Development. We'll talk about the focus in Lean on removing waste, introduce the Lean tools of Value Stream Mapping and Spaghetti Diagrams, and then apply those tools to the Build and Release process and also to the larger context of Enterprise Continuous Integration. There's a lot of material to cover in an hour and we think attendees should leave with some new ways on thinking about improving their processes.

Only a few days left so don't delay, register today.

Last week, I posted a new Twitter integration for AnthillPro. Integrating with Twitter wasn't really a critical piece of Urbancode's strategy for Anthill. We did have a new, exciting way to create integrations in the Plugin system and I wanted to try it out. Working with Twitter was just a straight forward way of testing out the new system.

Read on for a description (and video) of how to create a custom plugin for AnthillPro.

Read more...

Michael Hill offers one of the best analogies I've seen for those builds that always require a bit of hand-holding:

What’s a handle-jiggle? It’s anything in a build sequence that requires thought–effort, even–from the developer doing the build. If a file needs to be deleted before a build, make the build system delete. If you first have to download and install those two special libraries, make the build system install them. If you have to figure out what files are changed before a merge, make some software that does that.

Worth the read.

Alister Scott of the open source testing project Watir (pronounced "water") has published a short little how-to on getting your automated tests committed to Subversion.

Alister starts with the surprising observations that lots of testing organizations don't treat their automated test script as source code. I've seen this several places and others echoed it (along with their annoyance!) in the twitter conversation.

I think the reasons for this are mostly historical. For a long time the testers were treated as second class citizens and they had no alternative to develop their own practices apart from the development team. I think one of the benefits of the rise of Agile is increased collaboration between development and testers with (hopefully) and increase in respect for what testers bring to the table.

When Eric and I illustrated our observations on enterprise continuous integration maturity we saw the largest gap between current practices and recommended target in testing, and I think these lingering effects of tester exclusion is largely to blame. Without having your tests under source control you simply can't get the most our of them. But when you start treating them with due respect, which is to say like source code, you can start getting all the benefits of continuous integration that developers have come to expect with their unit tests.

Using the plugin system that's new to version 3.7, I wrote a little plugin that lets you send Twitter status updates automatically from AnthillPro.

AnthillPro can manage one or more Twitter accounts centrally. Any job can then include the "Tweet" step, which logs into Twitter as one of those accounts and updates the account's status. Configuration just requires loading the plugin, creating an account, and telling the step what message to send up to which account.

This could be used as part of continuous integration builds, but probably makes more sense for larger events like a production release.

Thanks to The Build Doctor for bringing this genius video to our attention: Hit and Run Build Breaker. A must watch for continuous integration people everywhere.