Agile builds

An extremely confused article in the SDTimes today.

What they get right is that a “build bottleneck” is a common feature of large agile projects and one of the big challenges in scaling Agile.

“Streamlining the build process is a quality-of-life issue for developers.” Absolutely right, but as importantly a slow build process lengthens quality feedback loops and reduces code quality.

The article goes on to say that the open source tools just aren’t up to the commercial tools. Absolute balderdash, as our company chairman might say. Anyone, like myself, whose tried the multi-thousand pound commercial development platforms and given them up for ant, cruise control and junit knows that this is nonsense and that the real problem is that development teams just don’t devote as much time to build as to features.

The big laugh though comes from a technologist recommending Visual SourceSafe – “But if you’re going to pay for anything, pay for good source control”. Hmm. I guess it’s better than nothing, but not by much.