White Papers

Build and Deployment Automation for the Lean Economy
In good economic times teams attempt bold experiments that promise to take them to new heights of productivity. In lean times like these, few have the appetite for such speculative ventures. Any new investment needs to address immediate pain and show immediate payback. But the pace of demands has not slowed and the ever increasing need to do more continues. For build and release teams the demands come from all directions. The shorter cycle times of Agile means more builds, more deployments and more releases. The adoption of SOA means more complexity and more elements to juggle. The move to global, round-the-clock 24-hour development means more teams to service and less downtime. And in this economy adding headcount is likely not an option. Instead you are told to get Lean and Mean. But how do you get to Lean and Mean without being stretched too thin?

This need to keep costs fixed while adding capacity makes improving efficiency key. Instead of attempting a wholescale change to how you develop software we will take an idea from Lean Software Development and focus on reducing waste, allowing you to deliver more in the same time and for the same cost. Build and deployment automation offer fertile ground for dramatic productivity gains that will improve the efficiency of the entire team.

Enterprise Continuous Integration Maturity Model
How mature are our Continuous Integration and automation practices? Where can we get the most improvement for our specific problems and needs? How are other organizations solving these same problems? This guide can help you answer these questions.

Continuous Integration and Build Management Server Evaluation Guide
This paper is organized around three feature sets that we typically see in evaluation scenarios. The first feature set focuses on Continuous Integration and provides some of the basic functionality required for an implementation of either Continuous Integration and/or Build Management. In this way, the Continuous Integration feature set lays the foundation for the Build Management feature set that follows.

Drawing the Line: Continuous Integration and Build Management
This paper seeks to get at the true nature of Continuous Integration and Build Management by decomposing each practice into its constituent elements and examining the repercussions thereof.