Is VBP Right For Me?

[Ciege]

Preface: I am not a "professional" build engineer of the traditional sense. I am a QA test automation & development professional who also has been tasked with automating our build process. Since I've been in test automation for more than a decade I think the company thought I would be the right person for the job. I've been "running the builds" here for about a year and have since crated a handful of batch files that use devenv.exe to do the builds (VS 2005/2008), do check outs from StarTeam using stcmd.exe, and do various file staging, installers, etc... Pretty much the entire build process from start to finish.

I've managed to write a sufficient GUI for automating the checkouts and order of the batch processing using AutoIT and it seems to work well. However, I've been asked to find a way to do everything cleaner and faster.

Currently it takes us about 20 minutes to check everything out (that includes the check out and a verification to verify everything was checked out correctly) and 20 minutes to build, stage, create installers and copy the finished build to the network. (FYI build server horsepower is most not an issue since I have recently moved everything to a much newer box that actually reduced us to the 40 minute mark from a previous high of 2 1/2 hours).

What I need to know is how can VBP help me do the same job I am doing better and faster...

Obviously with my current solution if something changes in the build process I need to visit one or multiple batch files to make the changes necessary. Also, since AutoIt is single threaded everything I do is a serial task. (Can VBP do processes in parallel and then wait for specific things to happen before another step or group of steps are started?).

Sorry for the newb questions but I know enough about the entire build process to "make it work" but I don't really know what I need to know to "make it better".

Thanks all...

[kinook]

With Visual Build, you can run parts of build process in parallel (see the last part of http://www.kinook.com/VisBuildPro/Ma...hainsample.htm). That may or may not actually make the build faster, depending on CPU usage, hard drive contention, etc.

As far as creating and managing builds, using Visual Build should definitely be much more productive than using batch files and AutoIT alone (see http://www.kinook.com/VisBuildPro/features.html).

You can watch the tutorials to get an idea of how Visual Build can help with the build process. The help and samples also provide a wealth of information for incorporating Visual Build into your build process.