“you are putting yourself into a complete blind spot right at one of tensest parts of a project”

So why is deployment any different? If your deployment process involves things that have not been done continuously every day, such as packaging files, copying them to servers, installing, configuring & starting processes, then you are doing deferred deployment. A deferred deployment is something that will delay the release and may take an unknown amount of time and involve an unknown amount of problems.

It may not be as easy to do Continuous Deployment - so keep it simple at first - grab your build artifacts from your Continuous Integration server, deploy them, automate the rest of your deployment process - then run some simple Deployment Tests:

• Is it up?
• Does it work?

Worry about adding more complicated things such as testing failover, load balancing etc. later. Just get some simple, automated deployment test coverage. I’ve seen & heard a lot of painful release processes, ones that take to 5 in the morning, ones that take 8 hours on the weekend, ones that involve a degree of ‘trial and error’ - don’t ignore your deployment problems - make them visible and try to fix them, just like you would with a slow build or a failing CruiseControl build.

So I invented (by accident) the Red Green Cup of Tea pattern - write a failing test, make the test go green, and go and make a cup of tea whilst the build runs. I’ve found that whilst making a cup of tea, my pair and I can reflect on what we’ve just done and often find we weren’t 100% happy with what we just did. We then set our cups of tea back down on the desk and Refactor the code.

Feature Development

Logging in:

After logging in:

(The black box saying ‘quick-cruise’ is the build-o-matic build being monitored : it goes red for last build failed, green for success and black if it can’t find the build-o-matic server (this is because I didn’t have a build-o-matic running when i took these screenshots))

(The two tiny icons are the pictures of the people who are currently logged in (me and no-one))

After I break the build:

A picture of our builds (Uh-oh - looks like the e2e build has crashed and the branch build is broken!):

Where can I get this plugin?

Coming soon - currently integrating with main build-o-matic source.

Is there an eclipse version?

Yes - but it’s no where near as good - only has the status bars.

Comments and feature-suggestions welcome