Buildbot, an Introduction
Buildbot (http://buildbot.net) is a software written in Python that automates the compile and test cycles for any kind of software projects. It is configurable in a way that every change made on a source code repository generates some builds and launches some tests, and then provides feedback to the software developers.
Buildbot is used in many established open source software projects, including Python itself. Jumping over to http://www.python.org/dev/buildbot/stable/ will in fact show you the live build status of Python! Cool stuff.
What's with the Green, Red, Orange and other colors?
Each column in the buildbot status console corresponds to a specific build composed of steps and is associated with some build slaves. The entire system is driven by a build master where:
- The build master centralizes and drives everything
- A build is a sequence of steps used to build an application and run tests over it
- A step is simply an atomic command to check out the files of a project, to build the application and to run tests
A build slave is a machine that is responsible for running a build. It can be located in any physical location as long as it can reach the build master.
When a build passes, the buildbot console will display a nice green block. If tests failed, a red colored block will show instead.
For any large scale software implementation with multiple software developers (more than 2), continuous integration (CI) systems like buildbot is THE indispensable glue that keeps the team's work in sync; and is key to reducing the amount of defects reaching the production software for end users.
Why Continuous Integration?
Continuous integration runs various unit tests automatically whenever new code commits are pushed up into your staging and/or production server. Think of it as a safety net to ensure that new functionality that's introduced into the code base does not introduce surprises into the existing code base.
Use a continuous integration solution - or suffer the consequences of midnight phone support calls from your software end users! ;)
Have fun building!
Category: Continuous Integration
Discussion
How exactly do you setup buildbot for continuous integration? From the huge manual at http://djmitche.github.com/buildbot/docs/latest/ I gather that you can only get delayed testing after a commit has already reached production. More of a quick failure notification than an automated way of stopping bugs to reach the end-user...
BTW, have you noticed the requirements? Twisted, TwistedMail, TwistedWeb, TwistedWords and ZopeInterface :-)
Okay, okay... I get the hint! :)
Here you go: http://www.od-eon.com/blogs/calvin/tester-bender-alternative/
Haha. Have fun!
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