At my previous job at large american hand held manufacturer, they had a really nice build system that was integrated with sharepoint. With it, they could schedule builds through a web page on their separate products. I was pretty amazed by it and it seemed so complex. But now I have a tool that can do the same thing for free.
Hudson has some nice features:
- Builds trends - How often does the build break? Does the build time increase for every build?
- Periodical builds Or when someone commits
- Test trends - Is the number of failed test increasing or decreasing over time? Does the test cover more and more code? (Clover plugin)
- Emails when a build fails - An email can be sent out when someone checks in code that breaks. Apparently it can even email those responsible for breaking the build (that I havent tested yet)
- Multiple jobs that can be shared one or several machines.
- Shell access, you can run any batch file or shell script from the builds; so it is very easy to integrate into your current build situation
- Plugins - To integrate with Trac and other bug reports; Jabber and IRC support, etc.
Take a test drive of it (check out the webstart) and you will be pleasantry surprised.
