a little madness

The headline new feature in Pulse 1.2 is personal builds. A personal build is a build of the current state of your working copy on the Pulse server. This allows you to test your changes before you commit them to version control. The most obvious advantage of this is that you don’t have to taint your shared source base with untested code to get a CI build. You test first, then commit when you are happy. However, there are also some less obvious advantages:

• Multiplatform testing: Pulse supports distributing a build across multiple agents in parallel. This allows you to easily test on multiple platforms. Couple this with personal builds, and you can easily test code on platforms other than your preferred development platform while you develop. No need to struggle with slow builds over a networked file system, or to manually move the code about to test.
• More efficient resource usage: you can submit a personal build to your Pulse build farm and still have your development machine free for other tasks. You can also make use of free developer machines as Pulse agents, but that is for another post :).
• Full reporting: just like every other build, Pulse extracts and reports interesting information for personal builds via a rich web interface. This beats digging through hundreds of lines of build logs and scratching up test reports to find the relevant info. Pulse can also be configured to send you notifications when personal builds complete, just like a CI build. You can even customise both the information Pulse extracts from the logs and the format of the notification messages.
• Build history: Pulse will remember your recent personal builds (as many as you choose) and keep the results available for browsing. This makes it possible to refer back to an earlier issue without scrolling frantically in your console buffer (if you’re lucky enough to have the output at all!).

Personal builds are just one way in which we are making Pulse do more than your regular continuous integration server. From the start, we have seen Pulse as not just a server that sits on the sideline, but as a tool that you can leverage during every day development. This is why we have a strong focus on the developer in Pulse: every developer has their own account with a configurable dashboard and very flexible notification settings. Adding personal builds to the mix expands on what you can do with Pulse as you develop, and it is just one of a suite of tools we have or plan to add to Pulse in the near future.

Anyhow, I hope I’ve piqued your interest in the idea. If so, check out the Early Access Page for Pulse 1.2, and enjoy!

Liked this post? Share it!

This entry was posted on Friday, November 17th, 2006 at 1:28 am and is filed under Agile, Continuous Integration, Technology, Zutubi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.