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Hi Ruben,

Thanks for checking out the new Bamboo product and this website.

"Continuous Integration" is a relatively new concept and is almost synonymous to "automated builds" if you are perhaps familiar with that term. The idea behind this server is to allow software to be continuously integrated during development.

In a non continuously integrated environment, the typical development cycle involves a team of developers checking in code at their leisure to a source repository. The changes which each developer make may, in fact, cause breakages in the system if applied in conjunction with other changes by other developers. In the typical cycle, these breakages are rarely picked up until "integration" - when the software is built as a whole (probably for a release!) and tested.

The idea behind a "Continuous Integration" server is to make sure that this integration occurs constantly (with Bamboo, this can occur when a developer commits to code changes to the source repository, or in regular time period intervals). At any point in time, the development team will know the state of their build, whether it is breaking, or successful. Having a "Continuous Integration" server can provide some substantial benefits to a development team, by:

• Reducing risks - at any stage, the team will know whether the build is breaking. This gives the team a "comfort level" of the software, and helps to ensure that the build does not deviate from a "releasable" state significantly, as breakages are picked up immediately.
• More traceablility - as a build is integrated constantly, it is easy to trace who and what has "broken the build".
• Making it simpler to track down problems and breakages - as breakages are picked up almost immediately after they are introduced.

Hopefully, the above has given you a little more explanation into the concept of "Continuous Integration". We will be publising more documentation about both "Continuous Integration" and Bamboo as the product matures - so please stay tuned!

Regards,
Edwin

A somewhat seminal article by Martin Fowler is available here.

Austin,

Any chance of getting a demo site up that we can poke around?

We're trying to get something sorted out with this. Stay tuned for the next day or two.

Care to point out any features that you feel are different from AHP, specifically, or CI build tools in general?

We're currently working on a feature tour, which should make all this more apparent.

One of the keys is to Bamboo is to provide you with useful comprehensible information and statistics. We call this Build Telemetry. Telemetry visualises build trends and assists you make informed decisions and actions on your build processes.

At a glance, you can see this project is getting slowly worse. This month's builds are failing more than ever (apart from the initial setup period) and the trend is down. You can also find other useful information about a build:

• When a build breaks, how long does it take to be fixed?
• What's the longest a build's been breaking for?

So you find that you're breaking more builds. Is it because people are getting careless? Or are the tests themselves prone to failing? In Bamboo, you can check out the top 10 most failing tests and begin your investigations. From there, you can drill down to see how many times a test has failed, who broke and and how long it took to fix.

What can you make of all this? Maybe you need to ensure that developers are less gung-ho about checking in broken code? Perhaps you find the tests themselves are flawed, and need to address them. Whatever decisions you need to make, Bamboo allows you can understand your builds collectively, not just individually. See the big picture of your builds, if you will.

This might all sound a bit like mumbo jumbo at the moment, but as soon as we get a test instance up and a feature tour going, this should be much clearer.

Cheers,

Mark C

Mattias,

We won't have time to add ClearCase support for the 1.0 release.

I've raised an issue for you at:

http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/BAM-623

You can watch that issue for when we get some updates on this front.

Cheers,

Mark C

Christopher,

Distributed builds is something that's high on our priority list. We're going 1.0 within the next month, and will be focussing our efforts on it for 1.1. Hope that clears it up!

Cheers,

Mark C