Build automation has simplified our dev environment and made coe accessible to everyone in the org
What do you like best?
We run a complicated SaaS application. The site itself doesn't need to be built or complied but the database, settings, and integration with other software needs to be configured for development or production environments. This used to be a tedious task requiring many steps which lead developers to all have their own unique procedures. When we finally got around to automating the entire setup with ant, we got all developers on the same page. Now we can deploy a complete instance of the application for testing with a few scrips and we know everyone is working off the same build. Its even allowed non-technical staff to deploy previews of builds on their own systems with just some basic commands.
What do you dislike?
Ant scripts are written in XML which can be overly verbose and a little confusion some times. The limited lack of error handling and reporting can also make writing and testing scripts slightly more complicated they possibly needed.
What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?
The ability to quickly setup and deploy a full environment to deploy our application in has saved time, reduced errors or confusion in builds, and streamlined our development processes.
