Lean teams aggressively identify waste in all their processes and act to strip it out. The transmission of files as part of the deployment process is often wasteful. This article looks at two elements contributing to slow downs. First, redeploying unchanged files alongside changed files. And, secondly moving the same files across a slow WAN repeatedly to deploy to numerous environments.

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This week, I was in New York visiting customers and prospects. When I asked one team why they had decided to expand build and deployment automation, their answer almost knocked me over:

"Well, we've really been increasing our pace of development and getting more agile. The end result is that we're getting more and more build requests - and the matching deployment requests - and it's more than our manual processes can really handle. You see in order to service a build request, we have to do [redacted]... and while it doesn't interfer with our other duties if we're just doing a couple builds a day, we're quickly becoming full time builder runners and our CM, coordination and other duties are suffering."

This is exactly the scenerio Jeffery and I had presented in our Agile Journal Webcast on Tuesday. I was stunned by how closely they mapped to our hypothetical typical team suffering inefficient processes conflicting with modern development techniques.

In the presentation, Agility was highlighted along with distributed development and SOA as driving forces placing increasing pressure on build engineers. Inefficient build processes that used to be tolerable because they were run relatively infrequently are becoming increasingly painful as the build, test and deployment rates increase.

You can watch a recording of this presentation.

I recently blogged about 3 Alternatives to Writing Ant Script from Scratch. One of the options I listed was Ant Script Library and over the weekend a new version, Ant Script Library 1.1.0 was released. For a summary of change changes check out Joe's blog entry.

Today we offer a guest blog entry from Paul Julius. Paul extends the Enterprise Continuous Integration Maturity Model that Eric and I developed by bringing in an important missing element: Culture.

As I started to use this model more and more, I realized that there was an element missing that I wanted to highlight for my clients — culture. There are plenty of organizations that have paid big bucks for a CI tool. Some of those have setup a working continuous integration system. They may be somewhere in the middle of the adoption curve, say "Intermediate" on most of the aspects of the maturity model. Yet, they are failing to see many of the benefits promised by continuous integration. Promises like green builds almost all the time and high developer productivity can prove elusive, no matter how elaborate the CI system. I wondered to myself, "What are we missing?"

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Tomorrow (Wednesday Sept 9th) at 2 pm EDT / 11 am PDT Maciej Zawadzki and Damon Poole are going to be talking about Release Management Best Practices: Balancing Agility and Compliance.

The origin of this talk is the conflict we see in development organizations between the people who are trying hard to go faster, and the people who are trying hard to stay in control. There seems to be a fundamental tension between speed and safety... but in practice this is a false dichotomy. Automating manual tasks is a huge win both for time saved and for process enforced, for both Agility and auditing.

If you'd like to hear more you should Register Now and the join us Wednesday.

The message of our Build Engineer Bootcamp was that build scripts need to be treated more like code. Douglas Bullard has some really excellent slides on Object Oriented Ant Scripts that show how to take common OO concepts and apply them in Ant. But another important idea that Paul and I brought up was the idea of reusing common libraries.

Most developers recognize the productivity gains of using libraries rather than writing all code for a project from scratch. And yet on these same projects — with the notable exception of projects using Maven — there is little thought given to writing every single line of the build scripts fresh. In our bootcamp we were happy to point out some projects that provide an alternative and I'm happy to share them again now:

ant-master-build-scripts

From the aforementioned Douglas Bullard, this project provides A collection of "master" Ant build scripts, which can be used to make your individual project build scripts 5-10 lines long with a particular focus on J2EE projects and leveraging Ivy for dependency management.

easyant

Another project combining Ant and Ivy, easyant looks to provide an Ant-based alternative to Maven with lots of conventions to get default behavior. The product of a group rather than a single person easyant is under more active development than the ant-master-build-scripts.

Ant Script Library

The work of Joe Schmetzer, Ant Script Library lays out some pretty clear design principles. While similar at first glance to easyant the Ant Script Library shows much less Maven envy and is therefore less centered around Ivy. ASL is under active development and on his blog Joe has recently discussed adding support for more code metrics tools and for an enhanced JDepend.

Tomorrow (Wednesday Sept. 2nd) I'll be presenting a webinar with Alen Zukich of Klocwork on Improving Development Productivity with Static Analysis and Enterprise Continuous Integration. Personally I think combining static analysis with continuous integration is like mixing chocolate and peanut butter ("two great tastes that go great together"). Finding bugs early with static analysis can take some of the pressure off of QA and CI makes sure that you're running the analysis early. (And of course static analysis makes an appearance on our Elements of Enterprise CI wallchart.)

In this webinar we'll discuss the benefits of static analysis and CI independently, we'll each talk about our special tricks, and then we'll show the new Klocwork/AnthillPro integration.

Our talk is tomorrow so if you're interested you should register today.