In the world of large scale software platform development, one of the basic platform attributes is build speed and a common question of capability is:
“How long does your build take?”
Experience shows this to be a loaded question with only one acceptable answer: 1 hour.
Anything higher and it may as well be 8 hours since it is not worth waiting during the day and can be put off overnight. Anything lower will raise suspicions and may lead to a full-day Agile workshop. So it was pleasing to note recently that we are now regularly building the Symbian platform in an hour(*).
Beyond just showing off, we’re excited about the ways in which we can build(!) on this capability to help the community:
- Promoting the great work of the Raptor team, owners of the sbs tool which we use as the basis of our builds – we expect to start doing “continuous integration” where any change to sbs triggers a platform build using the new version.
- Hosting builds on behalf of the platform contributor community – we expect to start doing this in support of the CompilerCompatibility branches
- Sharing of build times around the community and collaborating to drive community build speeds down – we look forwards to hearing about your experiences
—
(*) Well, pretty close. See Andy Simpson’s build machinery page for the smallprint.
