Attacking slow-running builds (notes from CITCON)

1 Jul, 2008

Last weekend I went along to CITCON here in Melbourne. Which was great fun, by the way.

There I ran a session on "Attacking slow-running CI builds". It was a small group, but an interesting discussion, I think. Here are my (rough, unedited) notes:

WHAT is the impact of a slow build?

WHY is the build slow?

HOW can we make it faster?

Thinking about this later ...

There are two types ...

The suggestions for improving build times seemed to fall into two categories:

  1. optimise the build/tests
  2. throw additional hardware at the problem

My problem with the "throw hardware at it" approach is that it typically only helps for the build-server machine; the poor old developers are still left with a slow-running build, and therefore many of the productivity issues still exist.

Another idea

It occurs to me now that we missed a fairly fundamental trick to improve test times: improve the performance of the system-under-test itself. It's a great excuse to start thinking about performance earlier in the project.

"Customer Acceptance Test" does not need to mean end-to-end

On all the projects I've been on in recent years, we've ended up with the majority of the tests being either "developer unit tests", which run super-fast, or "customer acceptance tests" which test end-to-end (browser-to-database) and run super-slow.

Methinks it should be less black-and-white. If we can demonstrate functionality that the customer cares about by calling the underlying logic directly (i.e. at unit-test level), rather than by exercising the user-interface, then what's wrong with that? (We just need one test to prove that the underlying logic has been properly integrated into the UI.)

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