============================
Questions:
I could use some advice on the current state of C# build tooling.
* What choices are available and how would you contrast them? I am
currently aware of NAnt, MSBuild and NMaven but have little experience
with any of them, although I am user level expert with Ant and Maven.
Are there any commercial solutions which are currently way ahead of
the above choices?
* Although i am convinced a maven based .NET build will potentially
one day satisfy all my requirements, I don't have a great grasp of the
status quo. Is NMaven in its current state a better solution for a
very large project than other choices?
* If NMaven is currently mature enough to use on a very large project,
what steps should I take to avoid problems? For example I assume I
will need to create an in-house release and drop it into an in-house
repo/repo-proxy such as artifactory.
* Are there any up-to-date articles or other such information covering
these questions? I have taken a look around via google but not found
anything particularly compelling.
It is my hope the sections below will provide some contextual color
and specificity to the above questions.
Thanks in advance for all the time and effort spent responding to this
post.
=============================
Problem Context:
I have very recently joined a newly formed architecture team of a
large (>50 developer) .NET based project. The project has
historically been a huge mess, but new leadership is beginning to
change things for the better. Over the last few months the
organization has started to very successfully apply the scope and
customer management aspects of agile development.
Unfortunately, the code quality aspects of agile development are yet
to be engrained into the company culture. By this I mean test driven
development, automated integration tests, automated performance tests,
continuous integration, and frequent re-factoring as needed. There
appears to be a desire by the business to improve "quality" but little
understanding of what this means and how to achieve it.
To large extent I believe a project delivers on whatever is measured.
I believe much of the necessary quality related cultural change can be
affected by simply deploying good build automation. An important
aspect of this effort is the need for an information radiator which
brings attention and social pressures to bear on the quality aspects.
The information radiator can be as simple as a maker board with a few
simple code metrics for each sub-team alongside a large poster giving
business context to each metric. The metrics on the information
radiator are only intended to apply social/organizational pressures.
With sufficient motivation development teams will naturally take a
closer look at the more detailed quality reports produced by the build
system and other tooling.
=============================
My Background (your audience):
The majority of my expertise is in Java. I have expert user level
knowledge of maven based java builds. I have even written and
enhanced several maven plugins in the past including a few of the very
early (pre-NMaven) C# maven plugins. I am fairly familiar with the C#
core language but not with much of the library and tooling stack
for .NET development.
=============================
Characteristics of Desired Build System
* Sufficiently mature to avoid weeks of custom development and bug
fighting.
* Conducive to modular development.
* Support for completely automated releases (i.e. mvn release:prepare
release:perform)
* Sufficiently easy for junior and intermediate developers to learn
and use from a surface user perspective.
* Supports the evil that is clear case. (Should also support the
goodness that is SVN in the event my team is able to affect such a
change.)
* Produces test coverage, code complexity, and other such quality
reports.
* Easily driven by an appropriate continuous integration solution.
(Probably TeamCity)
=============================
Example Solution for Java based Code
* SVN for source control
* maven based build with properly configured release, and site plugins
* artifactory or similar for repo proxy
* TeamCity for CI. (CruiseControl, Hudson, etc. are great but not as
nice as TeamCity. The distributed builds and remote build
functionality are sadly unmatched by an OS solution.)
* Configure CI to send out emails on build critical failures.
* properly configured cobertura and/or clover plugin.
* various other quality metric report plugins (Checkstyle, PMD,
FindBugs, JDepend, etc.)
* Sonar (maybe XRadar)
* Large wall monitor(s) displaying results of Sonar overview page.
* Large poster beside wall mounted monitors giving business context to
each high level metric.
* Lots of mentoring and evangelizing to help influence the culture in
a positive direction.
Note: Sonar and wall monitors can be replaced with a frequently
updated marker board.
With experience all of the technical aspects can be put in place with
only a few days of work. The most time consuming part is actually
working out the dependencies section of the pom files for code with
lots of jars of unknown versions.
==============================
Thanks again for all your time and effort spent reading and responding
to this post.
Sincerely,
James Carpenter
cell: 832-677-7247
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
