Why should my development team have a build server?

Question

We know this is good to have, but I find myself justifying it to my employer. Please pitch in on why a development team needs a build server.

Answer 1

Two main reasons that non technical people can relate to:

• It improves the productivity of the dev team because problems are identified earlier.

• It makes the state of the project very obvious. I've shown my management the build status dashboard an now they look at it all the time.

One more thing. Something like Hudson is very simple to set up - you might want to simply run it somewhere in a corner for a while and then show it later.

Answer 2

There are multiple reasons to use build servers. In no particular order and off the top of my head:

1. You simplify the developers' workflow and reduce the chance of mistakes. Your build server can take care of multiple steps such as checking out latest code, having required software installed, etc. There's no chance of a developer having some stray DLLs on their machine that can cause the build to pass or fail seemingly at random.

   Your build server can replicate your target environment (operating system, etc.) and there's less of a chance of something working on developers' desktops and breaking in production.

2. While it's a good practice for developers to test everything they check in, sometimes they just don't. Then it's good to have the build server there to catch test errors and let the team know the product is broken.

3. Centralized builds provide easy access to code metrics -- which tests passed, which failed, how often, how well is your code covered by your tests, etc. Having a solid understanding of the quality state of the codebase reduces maintenance and testing costs by providing timely feedback that allows errors to be fixed quickly and easily.

4. Product deployment is simplified -- the developer or QA doesn't have to remember multiple manual steps. It can be easily automated.

5. The link between developers and QA is simplified. QA personnel can go to a known location to grab latest, propertly versioned builds.

6. It's easy to set up builds for release branches, providing an extra safety net for products in their release stage, when making code changes must be done with extra care.