Nightly Builds: Why should I do it? [closed]

Answer 1

You should do nightly builds to ensure that your codebase stays healthy.

A side effect of doing nightly builds is that it forces the team to create and maintain a fully automated build script. This helps to ensure that your build process is documented and repeatable.

Automated builds are good at finding the following problems:

• Somebody checked in something that breaks stuff.
• Somebody forgot to check in a necessary file or change.
• Your build scripts no longer work.
• Your build machine is broken.

Doing this nightly ensures that you catch such problems within 24 hours of when they occur. That is preferable to finding all the problems 24 hours before you are supposed to deliver the software.

You should also, of course, have automated unit tests that are run for each nightly build.

Answer 2

It also depends on the size and structure of the team(s) working on your project. If there are different teams relying on each others API, it may make a lot of sense to have nightly builds for frequent integration. If you're hacking away with only one or two team mates it may or may not be worth it.

Answer 3

Any build automation is better than no build automation :-)

Personally, I prefer daily builds - that way if the build doesn't work then everyone is around to get it fixed.

In fact, if at all possible then Continuous Integration builds are the way to go (i.e. a build on every check-in) as that minimizes the amount of change between a build and so makes it easy to tell who broke the build and also easy to fix the build.

Answer 4

I'd actually recommend to do builds every time you check in. In other words, I'd recommend setting up a Continuous Integration system.

The advantages of such a system and other details can be found in Fowler's article and on the Wikipedia entry among other places.

In my personal experience, it's a matter of Quality Control: every time code (or tests, which can be seen as a form of requirements) are modified, bugs might be creeping in. To ensure quality you should make a fresh build of the product as it would be shipped and perform all the tests available. The more often this is done, the less likely bugs will be allowed to form a colony. Therefore, daily (nightly) or continuous cycles are preferred.

In addition, whether you restrict access o your project to developers or a larger group of users, a nightly build enables everyone to be on the 'latest version', minimizing the pain of merging their own contributions back into the code.