Build systems, improving development and delivery. (Richard Clamp, Arthur Bergman)

45 minutes, Advanced, in English

When you're managing software projects that depend on 10.8 million lines of foreign code from 173 open source packages to compile and run, you start to feel the need for automation. At Fotango we have successfully developed and implemented an enterprise level cross-platform build system to manage all our release and development needs based completely on Open Source tools.

We will show how we did this, and the impact and improvements this has afforded our development and deployment processes. This allows us to continue our adoption of agile development processes.

The talk will focus on how we solved the process related problems, what kind of features were requested, and how we tackled the issues. The audience will learn the benefit of having an automated build system, how to implement it both technically and socially, and how to adapt it with the growing needs of the organization.

• The need for a build system
• Features of the build system
• Tracking external updates and contributing fixes/features (upstream patch management)
• Development of the build system
• Forcing a broad range of opensource packages to compile and test in an automated fasion
• Reporting tools to keep track of how and where development is headed
• How we opensourced components of the build system