Pushing the envelope of build performance

All Blog Posts (16)

Build Doctor, subbuilds, and free stuff!

The Build Doctor has a guest post by me talking about subbuilds. Check it out: SparkBuild – build optimisation. I've wanted to do something with his site for a long time now, so I'm really excited about the chance to post there. We're also running a giveaway for SparkBuild-branded USB drives with him; details in the article. Continue

Added by Scott Castle on January 14, 2010 at 11:00am — No Comments

Webinar on Build Avoidance with Subbuilds

On Thursday (12/17) I'll be talking about build avoidance, subbuilds, and Agile development in a webinar hosted by Agile Journal. If you're looking for more information about how subbuilds work, how they're different from other kinds of build avoidance, and how they're relevant to Agile development, you won't want to miss this!… Continue

Added by Scott Castle on December 15, 2009 at 4:37pm — No Comments

Build profiling with SparkBuild Insight

Curious about where your build time is being spent? Trying to identify which components take the most time to compile? Making guesses about whether it's worth the effort to parallelize the build? SparkBuild Insight has an array of reports which can answer these profiling questions.

… Continue

Added by Scott Castle on December 10, 2009 at 3:30pm — No Comments

SparkBuild release 1.0 is available

Electric Cloud and the SparkBuild team are pleased to announce the immediate availability of SparkBuild 1.0. This release supersedes all previous beta versions, and offers several improvements over release 113 beta. Installers for Win32 and Linux (x86) are available at www.sparkbuild.com Continue

Added by Scott Castle on December 8, 2009 at 10:19am — No Comments

Debugging broken builds with SparkBuild Insight: Implicit Dependency Mistakes

In the previous articles: Debugging broken builds with SparkBuild Insight: Malformed Makefiles and Debugging broken builds with SparkBuild Insight: Simple Problems we covered some basic broken-build scenarios: source code errors and broken makefiles. This installment will look at another common cause of failed builds - implicit… Continue

Added by Scott Castle on November 18, 2009 at 10:00am — No Comments

Debugging broken builds with SparkBuild Insight: Malformed Makefiles

In the previous 'Debugging broken builds' article we looked at how to troubleshoot a build that failed from a source code error. In part II, we'll look at a more difficult problem: makefile-based failures. Case Study: Malformed Makefiles (Grab this annotation file if you'd like to look at this example in your own SparkBuild Insight:… Continue

Added by Scott Castle on November 12, 2009 at 12:00pm — No Comments

Navigating unfamiliar makefiles

Eric Melski posted a helpful article covering how SparkBuild can be used to quickly navigate unfamiliar makefiles over at the Electric Cloud blog. He's got a great example of how annotation can make understanding a cryptic makefile much easier. Continue

Added by Scott Castle on November 11, 2009 at 12:01pm — No Comments

Debugging broken builds with SparkBuild Insight: Simple Problems

Writing code is great - good money, free soda, much more comfortable than yard work - until that code suddenly won't compile, and you're stuck trying to troubleshoot why. SparkBuild Insight owes its roots to solving build problems: in the beginning at Electric Cloud we had to run other peoples' builds, and (while being watched over our shoulder) quickly diagnose and fix failures. So we built a visualization tool which would display the results of a software build, and let the user drill into the… Continue

Added by Scott Castle on November 10, 2009 at 9:00am — No Comments

Basics of annotation files

If you've been working with SparkBuild and SparkBuild Insight for a while, you may be wondering about annotation files. There's a ton of data wrapped up in that xml structure, so here's a basic guide to the format and content of annotation.

Definition: Annotation is an XML document that is optionally produced by emake as it runs: it describes a build in detail

It looks like this:

<build id="8" start="9/27/2008 5:56:33 PM">    <properties>...</properties>

… Continue

Added by Scott Castle on November 6, 2009 at 12:00pm — 14 Comments

10-minute 'self-pilot' for SparkBuild

At Electric Cloud, we're always setting up some new build environment - but we're pretty much in build central by the nature of our products. For most developers, this sort of thing happens once in a while, not every day! So if you're interested in trying out SparkBuild, but don't have a project which is easy to try it on right now, let me give you a ten-minute "self-pilot" that you can do right now. These instructions are for Windows (because it's the more complicated test platform) - Linux is… Continue

Added by Scott Castle on November 4, 2009 at 10:00am — No Comments

International attention for SparkBuild

Lately SparkBuild has been getting attention from developers all around the globe! This blog post got our attention here at Electric Cloud because it represents two firsts: the first review of SparkBuild using the cyrillic alphabet, and the first deployment we've seen on FreeBSD. Here's the link to Alex Gromnitsky's post:… Continue

Added by Scott Castle on October 29, 2009 at 4:12pm — No Comments

What is SparkBuild?

For an informal overview of the features in SparkBuild, check out my post "What is SparkBuild?" at the Electric Cloud Blog! Continue

Added by Eric Melski on October 27, 2009 at 10:38am — No Comments

Subbuilds: build avoidance done right

I wrote up a more thorough explanation of subbuilds and how they work for the Electric Cloud Blog. Read it here! Continue

Added by Eric Melski on October 26, 2009 at 11:29am — No Comments

New videos: What to do when SparkBuilds Don't

We've started a new tutorial series on SparkBuild - called What to do when SparkBuilds Don't - which will cover common build failures when using SparkBuild, and how to resolve them. The first video in the series - Missing Dependencies - is now available. Continue

Added by Scott Castle on October 16, 2009 at 9:29am — No Comments

Are you using our video guides?

Do you read software manuals? I mean, really read, for comprehension, not just searching for keywords or referencing some command-line argument table. Yeah, me neither. With SparkBuild we’re providing traditional, ready-to-print user guides for SparkBuild Insight and for emake, but we’re also trying something completely new to Electric Cloud – video tutorials. These are five to seven minute vignettes covering topics like… Continue

Added by Scott Castle on October 15, 2009 at 1:00pm — No Comments

Welcome to the SparkBuild Community!

We're very excited about this brand new community, and we're glad you've joined. In the coming weeks, look here for exclusive downloads, documentation, how-to videos and blog posts from the team. Be sure to check out (and post questions in) the forums, and try out the website, too. As an early-adopter you're looking at the latest, cutting-edge technology and a brand-new website from Electric Cloud, and your feedback on what works (and what doesn't!) is really important to us. Thanks, - The Elec… Continue

Added by Scott Castle on October 12, 2009 at 1:00pm — No Comments

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