Nightly builds: why should I do this?

Question

Why should I do Nightly Builds?

Answer 1

You must do nightly builds to keep your codebase healthy.

A side effect of nightly builds is that it forces the team to create and maintain a fully automated build script. This helps ensure that the assembly process is documented and repeated.

Automated builds are good at finding the following issues:

• Someone checked something that breaks the material.
• Someone forgot to check the file or change it.
• Build scripts no longer work.
• Your build machine is damaged.

Running this night ensures that you catch such problems within 24 hours of their occurrence. It is preferable to find all problems 24 hours before you have to deliver the software.

You should also, of course, have automatic unit tests that run for each nightly build.

Answer 2

I personally found continuous integration better than nightly builds:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_integration

I even use it in one-person projects, it is amazing how quickly you can identify problems and take care of them right there.

Answer 3

I have been doing construction engineering (by the way) for 16 years. I am firmly convinced that you build early, build, often, continuous integration. So, the first thing I do with the project is to establish how it will be built (Java: Ant or Maven ; .NET: NAnt or MSBuild ) and how it will be managed ( Subversion or some other version control). Then I will add continuous integration ( CruiseControl or CruiseControl.NET ) depending on the platform, and then let the rest of the developers free themselves.

As the project grows and the need for reports and documentation grows, the assembly will ultimately take longer. At this moment, I break assemblies into continuous assemblies (runs on checkin), which only compile and run unit tests and daily assemblies that build everything, run all reports, and build any generated documentation. I can also add an assembly that places the repository and does any additional packaging for client delivery. I will use small-scale assembly targets to manage parts so that any developer can create any part of the system - the continuous integration server uses the same assembly steps as any developer. Most importantly, we never supply an assembly for testing or a client that has not been built using the assembly server.

What I do is why I do it (and why you should too):

Suppose you have a typical application with several projects and several developers. Although developers can start with a common, consistent development environment (the same OS, the same patches, the same tools, the same compilers), their environment will diverge over time. Some developers will religiously apply all security patches and updates, others will not. Some developers will add new (perhaps better) tools, others will not. For some, do not forget to upgrade their full workspace before it is built; others will only update part of the project that they are developing. Some developers will add source code and data files to the project, but forget to add them to the source control. Others will write unit tests that depend on the specific features of their environment. As a result, you will quickly see all the popular “Well, it builds / works on my machine” excuses.

Having a separate, stable, consistent, well-known server for creating your application, you can easily detect these problems and run the assembly from each commit, you can accurately determine when a problem arose in the system. More importantly, since you use a separate server to create and package your application, it will always pack the same every time. There is nothing worse than having a ship builder with a custom assembly for the client, his work, and then I don’t know how to reproduce the settings.

Answer 4

When I saw this question, I first looked for Joel Spolsky's answer. A bit disappointed, so I planned to add it here.

Hope everyone knows about Joel Test for a career .

From Your Joel Test Blog : 12 Steps to Improving Your Code

3. Do you make daily builds?

When you use a control source, sometimes one programmer accidentally checks something that breaks the assembly. For example, they added a new source file, and everything compiles fine on their machines, but they forgot to add the source file to the repository code. So they lock their car and go home, forgetting and happy. But no one can work, so they also need to go home, unhappy.

A build failure is so bad (and so often) that it helps build daily to ensure that breakage does not go unnoticed. On large teams, one good way to ensure that breakdowns are recorded immediately is to do daily gathering daily, for example, at lunchtime. Everything does as many checks as possible before lunch. When they return, the assembly is complete. If it worked, great! Everyone checks the latest version of the source and continues to work. If the assembly fails, you fix it, but everyone can continue to work with the pre-assembly, a continuous version of the source.

In the Excel team, we had the rule that whoever broke the assembly, as their "punishment", was responsible for the nanny builds, while someone else broke it. It was a good incentive not to disrupt the build, but a good way to turn everyone through the build process so everyone knows how it works.

Although I don’t have the ability to do daily builds, I really love it.

Still not convinced? Read the short description here at Daily Builds - your friend !!

Answer 5

In fact, you do not want you to want it to be continuous integration and automatic testing (this is a step forward than nightly builds).

If you have any doubts, you should read this article by Martin Fowler on continuous integration .

To summarize, you want to create and test errors as quickly and as often as possible in order to immediately identify errors, so that they can be fixed, and what you tried to achieve when you called them is still fresh in your mind.

Answer 6

I would recommend doing builds every time you register. In other words, I would recommend setting up a continuous integration system.

The advantages of such a system and other details can be found in Fowler's article and in the Wikipedia entry among other places.

In my personal experience, this is a matter of quality control: every time the code (or tests, which can be considered as a form of requirements) changes, errors may occur. To ensure quality, you must make a new assembly of the product, as it will be shipped and perform all available tests. The more often this is done, the less likely errors will be allowed to form a colony. Therefore, daily (night) or continuous cycles are preferred.

In addition, regardless of whether you restrict access to the project to your developers or to a larger group of users, the nightly build allows everyone to be in the "latest version", minimizing the pain of merging your own contributions back into code.

Answer 7

You want to do builds on a regular schedule to catch code integration issues between developers. The reason you want to do this at night, unlike the weekly or some longer schedule, is that the longer you wait to find these problems, the more difficult it will be to solve them. The practice of building an assembly at each test (continuous integration) simply leads to a nightly build process to its logical limit.

In the long run, it is also important to have a repeating assembly process. If you work in a team where several projects take place, then at some point you will need to easily recreate the old assembly, perhaps to create a patch. :(

The more you can automate the build process, the more time you save for each subsequent build. It also takes the build process itself from the critical delivery path of the final product, which should make your manager happy. :)

Answer 8

It also depends on the size and structure of the team (s) working on your project. If there are different teams that rely on each other's APIs, it can make a lot of sense to have nightly builds for frequent integration. If you hack only one or two teammates, it may or may not be worth it.

Answer 9

Depending on the complexity of your product, continuous integration may or may not be able to run a full suite of tests.

Imagine that Cisco is testing a router with literally 1000 different tests to test. It takes time to run a full suite of tests on some products. Sometimes weeks. Therefore, you need assemblies for different purposes. Nightly assembly can be the basis for a more thorough set of tests.

Answer 10

Well ... I think it depends a lot on your project, of course. If this is just your hobby project, with no releases, no dependencies, and no one other than sending the code, this might be redundant.

If, on the other hand, the development team sending the code, automatic nightly build, helps you ensure the quality of the code in the repository. If someone does something that “breaks the assembly” for everyone else, it will be quickly noticed. You can break an assembly without noticing, for example, forgetting to add a new file to the repository, and nightly assemblies in a centralized location will find them pretty quickly.

There are, of course, other possible benefits, I'm sure others will supply them. :)

Answer 11

I think they are very important, especially for projects with more than 1 person. The team should know as soon as possible if someone:

• will check in a bad file
• does not check file
• ...

Answer 12

Any build automation is better than build automation :-)

Personally, I prefer daily builds - this way, if the build does not work, everything around is fixed.

In fact, if possible, a continuous integration build is the way to go (i.e. build on each registration), as it minimizes the number of changes between builds and therefore makes it easy to identify who has broken the build and also easily fix the build.

Answer 13

Night builds are only needed for large large projects (when it takes too much time to build it often during the day). If you have a small project that doesn’t take much time, you can build it when you receive functional pieces of code so that you know that you did nothing in the procedures. However, with large projects this is not possible, therefore it is important to build the project just so that you know that you are still in working condition.

Answer 14

There are several reasons, some of which will be more applicable than others.

• If your project is being processed by two or more people
• This is a good way to grab the latest version of code that you are not working with.
• Nightly assembly provides a cut during the current state of the code
• Nightly build will give you stable build if you need to send code to people

Answer 15

Nightly builds are not always needed - I think they are really useful only for large projects. But if you are in a large project, nightly assembly is a good way to verify that everything works - you can run all your tests (unit tests, integration tests), build all your code - in a word, make sure that there is nothing in your project.

If you have a smaller project, the build and testing times will be shorter, so you can afford to do more regular builds.

Answer 16

Nightly builds are ideal for performing static code analysis (see qalab and the projects with which it collects statistics if you are in the java world). Unfortunately, this is rarely done.