www.eafx.com - Build Automation

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Build Automation

Build Automation is the task of programmatically automating the following steps in SDLC:

Extraction of a specific labeled release from the Source Control Repository.
Labeling the release, if needed in the Source Control Database.
Compilation of different components of the release to produce the executable binaries in one or all environments that the change will impact.
Deployment of all binaries to their true execution environment, testing the Packaging and Deployment scripts themselves.
Execution of the binaries in their True Execution environment to validate all the Test Cases (Unit, Integration and Regression).
Documenting the results of the Deployment and Testing and automatically notifying the development team members in the event that failure is detected along with “What/Where/How” information regarding the test cases that failed.
Automatically generating Documentation based on Code comments and the ability to generate release notes.

NOTE: Many organizations utilize deployment scripts to actually deploy changed modules directly to the Production environment. For some, automated deployment to production is not acceptable just because of the nature of the process. However, Build Packaging and Installers, along with the use of Smart Client / Manifest-Driven deployment architectures, we will attempt to make the task of deployment to production as automated as possible while maintaining strict controls, which is a purpose that Automated Testing will definitely serve when bundled with effective packaging and Deployment guides.