I came back this morning from the conference, my third time after Brussels in 07 and London in 06. It was great as usual. If you haven’t been to an Open Space conference, know that you are seriously missing out on something.
There are quite a few things to take away
- there is a surprisingly large number of CI tools, especially commercial; we had a demo of 7; CruiseControl by Paul Julius, build-o-matic by Ivan Moore, Hudson by yours truly, JetBrains TeamCity by Pavel Sher & Yegor Yarko, Rational BuildForge by Lieuwe, Zutubi Pulse2 by Jason Sankey, ThoughtWorks Cruise by Chris Read. Many others were not represented. I don’t quite understand why the market is so fragmented.
- CI tools get less interest than before; there were still a few sessions on CI (CI Tools Showdown, Future of CI…) but fewer than usual. Remember that CI is still the main reason why people come to this conference. Instead, more discussions about Agile in general, and on automated functional testing in particular
- Chris Read from ThoughtWorks wants to push for Open CI, an effort to standardize the storage format of CI tools, so that they can get integrated more easily with other (non-CI) tools, such as Trac, Mingle, etc.
Some advanced features that seemed interesting:
- personal builds (Pulse & TeamCity)
- pipelines (Cruise); I think someone mentioned working on such things in the past, though I cannot find traces of it right now.
- build templates (Pulse); you define things such as a JDK configuration, SVN connection in a template, and you optionally override them in actual jobs that inherit from them. Some (French) people came to me after the conference to explicitely request this on Hudson! I think Hudson is big in France.
- build steps parallelized (BuildForge, Cruise, others?); in a complex job, you can mark some consecutive steps (say, integration tests and acceptance tests) and get them to run in parallel instead
- real time display of the number of tests passing/failing (TeamCity)
- find out exactly who broke the build (build-o-matic)
Interestingly, most commercial tools have a free version (limited to 1 or 2 machines) and charge by the number of slaves (I didn’t realized that slaves were such in demand). Costs are around 10,000USD / year for 10 slaves.
For more on the conference, check out:
The next CITCON will be in Minneapolis/St Paul on April 17 & 18. Then, Brisbane in June. And CITCON Europe 09 is still TBD.
Oh, and Steve Freeman coined “Scrum is the new RUP”. I need a t-shirt with that.
Updates (06/10/08): it is Lieuwe, not Louis, who demoed BuildForge. Cleared up that Cruise is the only one doing pipelines and that it supports //ized steps.
My Fit plugin for Hudson and the translation into French got approved for the GAP program. This means I am going to receive money from Sun! I am going to be rich, rich, rich!
Err… not quite. Once the 30% tax is taken away by the US government (I probably qualify to get it reduced, but sorting out the paperwork is just too cumbersome), plus some possible tax by the French government, plus convertion into the I’m-feeling-high-these-days euro, I should end up with barely enough for a meal for two in Paris.
Oh well, who I am to complain? I would probably have do the work without any money anyway.
I am currently reviewing the first draft of Gojko Adzic’s book Agile Acceptance Testing (I am still at the beginning, but I like it so far). He has a citation from Bertrand Arthur Russell’s Philosophy of Logical Atomism that is just too good not to pass around:
Everything is vague to a degree you do not realise till you have tried to make it precise
With this, I leave you to meditate. ;-)
I have only mentioned once Sonar in the past on this blog. I should do that more often, as it is truly a great tool. If you read French, please check out my report on a presentation that Freddy Mallet, the Product Owner for Sonar, did on our premises a couple of weeks ago.
For today, I just wanted to mention that Hudson and Sonar, currently two of my favorite tools, have been brought together. This Hudson plugin makes sure that Sonar metrics are obtained from the current job. Good stuff!
You might have noticed that I am taking a great interest in the practice of Continuous Integration (especially in the tool Hudson, of course!).
Agile 2008 is just around the corner, and I’m particularly eager to hear the latest about CI. Here is a selection.
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I have refered a couple of times to the presentation by Jeffrey Fredrick and Alistair Cockburn. Jeffrey used it in a “How to introduce CI” session at CITCON London 2006. I also mentioned that a CI Game had been implemented for Hudson that can be seen as an implementation of the presentation.
Anyway, Jeffrey has finally put the presentation online on his blog. Thanks, Jeffrey!
These days, I have had the opportunity to think more about Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) with tools such as JBehave, RSpec, TestDox, and Test-Driven Requirements (TDR) with tools such as Fit, FitNesse, GreenPepper, Concordion. Here are my conclusions.
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After a pointer by Jérôme Piétri, a colleague of mine at Valtech, I have had a look at RichNesse, a WYSIWYG interface for editing pages under Fitnesse. It is based on FCKEditor. All in all, I am impressed.
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Readers to this blog know that I take every opportunity to talk about Hudson, one of the very best Continuous Integration tools. Well, I have another very good reason: you can contribute to it and make money, at least if you let yourself known before the end of June.
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The French translation of Hudson is a contribution I have made to the project. The work is complete for the core part of Hudson, and I consider it stable, though many bits are not internationalized, hence appear in English.
What can you do if you want to help?
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That’s what you get when you spend several days polishing a post. Unlike what I suggested in my previous post from today, Sun does seem to take action regarding Hudson. Kohsuke Kawaguchi, Hudson creator, has just been promoted to working on Hudson full-time. I’m jealous ;-)
Congratulations, Kohsuke! You deserve it.
I thought it’d be interesting to look at some download statistics for Hudson and CruiseControl, probably the 2 OpenSource CI tools with the most mindshare currently.
Want to know more about CruiseControl, Hudson, and other CI tools? Meet the creators, contributers and users at the next CITCON conference in Melbourne, June 27th & 28th. Cannot make it to Melbourne? Then CITCON Amsterdam, October 3 & 4 is for you (I know I‘ll be there). Or CITCON Minneapolis, April 17 & 18, 2009.
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Cédric Dhénin from TV4IT has an interview of me talking about TDD (in French). (more…)
The JavaPosse podcast #178 mentions that Hudson has reached version 1.200 in 2 years and a half. The hosts made jokes on the number of releases… well, by the time they aired on April 8th, Hudson had actually reached 1.205. And by the time I listened to the podcast on April 10th, we had reached 1.206. So there! ;-)
The North-American edition of CITCON, the conference on Continuous Integration and Testing is over. Check out the session notes on the conference wiki.
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