Continuous Integration

Continuous integration is an interesting tool that can be very helpful while developing software. Continuous integration allows for your team to upload the latest versions of the code to a repository (in my case GoogleCode) and then have Hudson automatically build the system for you and notify you when the build is complete and if it failed or completed successfully.

My initial impression of Hudson was that it was a nice way to automatically test your system. I found that the interface was well set up and easy to use and that if continuously gave detailed information about who was currently building, what the queue to build was and information about failed and completed builds. The only downside is that if the build failed there is no information on what caused the build to fail. However, the build shouldn't fail as it is the user's responsibility to run such tests as ant -f verify.build.xml to ensure a passing build before committing the changes.