program selection system

If short build times (< 10 minutes) are good and longer build times (> 20 minutes) are bad how do we achieve shorter build times without massive hardware investment and parallelization? What are the effects on a team/project as the build time goes up and how can we keep it under control.

This presentation/discussion is in two parts.

• Comparison of two project teams (1 with longer build times and one with <2 minute build times)
• Technical review of the how the short build times were achieved and maintained.

The project teams:

• Used an agile process Scrum/XP
• Paired
• Located in a single teamroom
• Wrote in Java
• Web based application
• Comparable size
• Local build server

Part 1

In the first part we explore how build times affected the performance, pace and working practices of the team.

• Checkin Frequency
• Velocity
• # broken builds
• Time to fix broken builds
• Happiness

Part 2

In part two we will explore how the application architecture and developer choices affect build times and indirectly productivity. This exploration will be code based (Java). Following a description of each key element there will be an open discussion on the effects of this element how it affected the build and team productivity.