AnthillPro Works With Developers

For developers, AnthillPro is designed to be an unobtrusive tool that adds real value to your work, not just another imposed process. However, AnthillPro does impact the way you do local development builds, but it performs authoritative builds the same way you do local builds. This means that you can continue to use existing build script without changing them. If you already use ANT build scripts to locally build projects, AnthillPro can use those same scripts. If you build your project from within the IDE (using the IDE proprietary build configuration), AnthillPro can, in most cases, run your IDE in headless mode to perform the build.

With the ALA (Application Lifecycle Automation) feature set, AnthillPro implements your processes the way you want. Rather than shipping with a pre-existing definition of what constitutes a promotion or deployment, you define these processes using AnthillPro's embedded workflow engine. Along the same lines, AnthillPro does not ship with limitations on the number of processes that you can define. So, if you don't want a promotion process, you don't have to. And if you want to test-flight instead of or in addition to any other processes, you can. AnthillPro is a tool that helps you achieve your goals and meet requirements, not one that tells you what your goals and requirements are.

Sharing Knowledge and Reuse

As the number of projects within an organization grows, the knowledge about each software asset becomes more and more difficult to manage. This often leads to duplicated effort because teams are not aware that they can reuse existing work. AnthillPro was, in part, designed to address this problem. AnthillPro provides a single place for a developer to find available projects. And because AnthillPro manages dependencies between projects, a developer can easily see what project is using other projects as dependencies, opening up the possibilities for more reuse.

Developer Self-Service

Many organizations have a well defined separation of roles preventing developers from doing things such as authoritative builds or deployments into a particular environment. Often, in order to perform a deployment to a specific environment, developers must first contact that environment's head of operations before the deployment can occur. This separation of roles exists for a good reason and is necessary; however, if the process is not automated, it can present big challenges to productivity.

AnthillPro tears down these productivity barriers by automating manual processes and implementing role-based policies governing who can do what. With AnthillPro, organizations can configure a process for deploying an application and, at the same time, configure a policy to allow developers to run that deployment process in the TEST or DEV environments. In this way, the once manual process of developers contacting operations folk and asking that they perform a manual activity is replaced with an automated process that the developers can execute at will.

Continuous Integration

If you've adopted one of the Agile Methodologies, then you know how important Continuous Integration is to your development process. AnthillPro is a perfect CI server. Any SCM that supports triggers can be configured to notify AnthillPro of a commit to your project. AnthillPro listens for these notifications and uses them to kick off builds. This means that there is no need for AnthillPro to poll the SCM for changes on a schedule, a process that can take up a lot of resources. Instead, AnthillPro simply reacts to every commit by kicking off a build.

AnthillPro also makes use of a quite period to ensure every build takes a consistent set of sources, rather than capturing changes in the middle of a commit. This is a big concern on a SCM without atomic commits. However, this can also be an issue even on a SCM with atomic commits, since developers often use multiple commits to check-in a related set of changes. With AnthillPro, quiet periods can be configured with different lengths for different projects, so you can work the way that is best for you.

When AnthillPro completes a build, it uses configurable Notification Schemes to send out the announcements. That means that you can be notified via e-mail, IM, or SMS. And different Notification Schemes can be set for different events, so that failed builds can SMS the project administrators and send e-mails to all developers contributing changes since the last successful build. If a build is successful, a quick IM can be sent to everyone on the team, letting them know of the new build, but with AnthillPro you choose not only who receives what notification but the form in which they receive it.