How do you update the RSS feed?

you enquire, trying to conceal the horror in your voice.

Oh, I just edit the Atom file manually, it’s not that hard.

says Chump.

Maybe nobody ever told Chump about wordpress.

At work, we just switched our build server from CruiseControl.rb to Hudson, and we won’t be looking back.

Ruby people, for some reason, seem distinctly inclined to use build servers made out of Ruby too. That’s nice and everything, but these things are childsplay in comparison to the maturity, usability, and feature-set of hudson.

Here’s why I recommend you switch to hudson for your Ruby / Git projects:

• open source
• piss easy to set up, even if you have no idea what java even is
• solid git support
• works with CCMenu (or your favourite CruiseControl monitoring desktop widget)
• kill builds from the GUI
• in fact, manage everything from the GUI
• distributed architecture, allowing you to delegate builds to multiple machines
• huge, active plug-in support
• you have better things to do with your time than faff around hacking on your build server

The problem is, it doesn’t have a smug website with fancy branding, so you probably overlooked it the first time. Go back and take another look.

Back in the pre-agile days when our projects were planned around component pieces of the architecture, “value” was a meaningless concept. The whole project had a value, but day-to-day that didn’t help us prioritise our work – from inside the plan it was impossible to judge whether my database stored procedure was contributing more value than your pricing component – without one, the other would simply not function.

As we started to plan around small deliverables like user stories, the concept of value came to the fore. Suddenly it was obvious that the “file saving” feature was much more valuable than the “conditional formatting” feature. This helped us immensely – we could prioritise our work around this value, and as a result actually felt the glow from knowing that the work we were doing was worthwhile, valuable even.

Now that value has become a first-class concept to software development teams, what happens when it becomes an obsession? When managers who can now measure value and velocity start to compare teams, or offer them incentives to deliver more, faster? When we as developers get so driven and focussed on the delivery of value that we forget to design, refactor, consolidate, reflect, and sharpen our tools? When we forget to go home on time?

We get burned out.

As ever, it’s the responsibility of the developers (and their leaders) to stand firm and hold on to the space and time that they need to do their work at a sustainable pace. Not all the hours you spend in a day – tidying up the build scripts, writing a code generator, cleaning up a library so you can release it as open source – can or should be directly attributed to the value they will immediately offer to the business. That’s not to say we should spend our days idling, but that we should maintain a level of self-respect in everything that we do.

As an avid reader of this blog, I know that you, like me, realise that continuous integration and testing are to software development what the spirit level and the plumb-line are to the construction industry: powerful tools that will one day be regarded as essential for any professional practitioner.


If you fancy meeting other like minds, come and join me at CITCON, the Continuous Integration and Testing Conference. What could be finer?