Hey,

On Fri, Dec 23, 2011 at 5:12 AM, cato1971 <[email protected]> wrote:

> I am looking to get involved in the Gradle community, am a user, advocate,
> fan and share it through all the channels available to me. I do have a
> passion for delivery (which was one of the reason Gradle appeals) but
> having
> just checked out the CI server have some questions to ask - and hope that I
> am asking them in the correct place.
>

Glad to have you on board :)

>From a deveoper viewpoint I find the Team City builds to lack what I would
> expect. I have not used Team City so forgive me if it is a tool
> capability/familiarity issue. When using Jenkins/Hudson in conjunction with
> Sonar for trending I see trends, visual test status, visual violations etc.
> I like to see groups of tests, module metrics to determine/maintain
> internal
> quality. It does not matter which tools, just that quality is maintained
> and
> measured - I am NOT for one moment questioning the quality of the code, am
> just advocating its visualization. I could contribute here if people feel
> it
> would be worthwhile.
>
> As for the build pipeline - the whole Continuous Delivery relies to some
> extent on limiting the time builds are in the red. I noticed that the
> builds
> on the CI take upwards of 50 minutes! Thats is a long time to wait for
> feedback on a build - are there ways to break the build down into stages
> that would provide faster feedback (or are the public CI builds merely the
> final stage of such a pipeline?).
>

We are aware the builds are long, however I'm not really that much
concerned about it. E.g. obviously I'd like the build to be fast but I
understand the trade-off of having lots of integration tests. Majority of
the build time is consumed by the integration tests and we are adding more
and more of them as we add features or improve the coverage. Decomposing
the build into smaller Team City jobs to form a pipeline wouldn't add much
value to my workflow. Since I know what I'm working on I tend to run
selective set of tests/checks before pushing to github and that is fast
enough for me.

Here're some things important that from my standpoint that are related to
build refactoring/maintenance.

1. Refactor the build somehow so that integTests are better separated so
that it's easier declare task dependencies precisely. E.g. some integ tests
need samples extracted from docs, some integ tests need zipped distro, all
integ tests need XXX. Currently all those prerequisites are lumped into a
sequence of actions that must happen before any integTest runs. That's
ineffective in development.

2. Measure/visualize the heap consumption for building a meaty multiproject
with reasonable dependencies. We'd like to trend that and grow it into nice
performance suite.

3. There're few integ tests that fail occasionally worth fixing properly so
that they will pass all the time.

4. Make the gradle project itself importable to eclipse. This requires
refactorings in the build. Introduce a test that will prevent breaking this
feature.

5. I'm pretty sure jira contains some maintenance tasks (however looking
them up might be somewhat a chore :)


> Could some of the developers share there experiences of the Gradle build
> pipeline and some of the complexities/issues it deals with - e.g need to be
> tested on different OS's and Java VMs etc. Would they like to see some
> improvements in the pipeline? Could I be of assistance in this process?

Apart from that am keen to pick up some maintenance tasks if anyone has a
> particular favourite for me to start with then point me in the right
> direction.
>

Regarding the build pipeline or CI maintenance tasks I'm not sure how
feasible it is to contribute because the contributor must be given access
to our private servers/infrastructure. Therefore we'd probably prefer
traditional contributions via github/pull request.

We're tight on time and usually it's taking some time to review / refactor
the pull request. That's why we prefer sweet and neat patches that have
tests, documentation, nice code, etc :)

Oh, and I'm speaking for myself so other team members might have a
different view!

Thanks a bunch for reaching out and sorry for quite a late response. You
have started a big subject, though =)


>
> Cheers
> Pete
>
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-- 
Szczepan Faber
Principal engineer@gradleware
Lead@mockito

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