Today I delved into the world of automation, in an attempt to try and refine and automate some of the process that happens around here. I have known about the existance of CruiseControl for well over a year now, but I haven’t had (or necessarily needed) the chance to use it. With the size of my development group growing larger on quite a regular basis, tools like this are going to become increasingly necessary.

What is Cruise Control?

Taken straight from their home page..

CruiseControl is a framework for a continuous build process. It includes, but is not limited to, plugins for email notification, Ant, and various source control tools. A web interface is provided to view the details of the current and previous builds.

This means we’ll be able to focus on bigger and better things, such as writing unit tests to improve the quality control of our code, automating deployments when it is time for our releases. (including database scripts that need to run, as well as the code)

Goals for this side project of mine include:

• Improving the way we version our database changes
• Bringing in regular use of unit testing into my group
• Bringing in regular use of functional and performance testing

From what I understand, CruiseControl, along with other tools such as ANT and Selenium will allow us to achieve these objectives. What will be interesting is that I haven’t read anywhere on achievements with this specific to ColdFusion.