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How can Anthill help me empower my development team?

Without a central build management server, each developer is literally an island. Yes, there is an occasional supply ship that visits the developer's island with news and supplies from abroad (source code committed by other developers). This ship also picks up the developer's work product (source code commits) if and when it's ready. Each developer has to perform local builds and local tests.

Authoritative builds that integrate changes from all developers in a clean environment are performed only occasionally and at great cost. More importantly, any tests that can't be performed by the developer on the developer's machine usually require manual intervention.

Ideally, each developer would have the ability to kick off a build of the entire system (including not only that developer's changes, but changes from all other developers) at will. Each developer should have the ability to kick off any automated test that may need to be performed on machines other than his or her own. For example, a developer working on a clustering feature of a server-based application should be able to easily deploy his or her changes to a server cluster and run automated tests.

How does AnthillPro help? AnthillPro can automate central builds. AnthillPro provides a web-based interface that is easily accessible by every developer and can be used to kick off a new build. AnthillPro can use the Build Life concept to allow a developer to run a series of automated tests on a build. AnthillPro can deploy the build artifacts to multiple machines prior to running automated tests.