lpr build this

More reading through Beautiful Teams gave me another good story.

This one was from Mike Cohn when he was asked what practices a team could do to improve the quality of the code.
Mike says that the first thing he would want a team to do is a continuous integration approach.

There's now a plethora of tools out there - Bamboo, CruiseControl, Hudson ( pardon me - Jenkins ), Team City, TFS, yadda yadda yadda.

This hasn't always been the case and Mike relates the tale from 1992 and how they utilised a Novell print queue to do the builds for them.


We actually wrote a build server that monitored a Novell print queue. Novell print queues were wonderful. They could hold anything. We put compile jobs into the Novell print queue, and we had a build server that would just monitor it and kick off compiles whenever it noticed anything getting inserted in there.

It was a completely cheesy, crappy way to do this network communication, but just on that application it had tremendous benefits


You might argue with Mike about whether CI is the #1 item on the list but you couldn't argue with that teams commitment to quality !