Some of my friends told me after reading my yesterday’s post that it went above their head. Particularly on automation. So let me start introducing build automation. In any project there are certain mundane tasks that get repeated over and over again. One of them is doing a build and deployment of your application. First lets list out what are the steps to be performed when you are ready to build an application for deployment or distribution.

1. Get the latest checked in code from version control system
2. Compile the code
3. Optionally make changes to certain configuration/property files to reflect your target environment
4. Package the compiled code and other resource files in the structure required
5. Distribute and/or deploy the packaged application

The above are the minimal number of steps that is required in any typical build process. Now think about this. Does any of the above step got anything to do with the actual project itself? Not really, whatever be the project you got to go through the above process, only the parameters are going to change like for example from which project folder you want to get from the version control and so on. Typically, if not hosting/deploying your application on a production environment, you ought to do build to do integration test in your development, QA and stage environments. Even if your project follows a waterfall methodology you would do a build quite a number of times atleast to do the integration test. Think about the amount of effort you may have to do if you are going to follow the above steps manually. Build automation is all about automating the above steps (and more as necessary). A click of a button or a simple command execution would result in the deployment of your latest code. We will dwelve more into it in the coming posts.