Virtualization Techniques for Cross Platform Automated Software Builds, Tests and Deployment

In this paper, an integrated approach for cross platform automated software builds and the implementation of a test framework is described. The system introduced here utilizes state-of-the-art virtualization tools to accomplish this task. In this way a single off the shelf PC can be used to build and test the software and in addition to that create deployable packages for multiple target platforms. Hence, the main contribution is an architectural concept for automated cross platform builds and testing based on virtualization of the processes that are platform dependent. The system was introduced for a large academic software library project in the field of robotics and machine vision. Here it is now productive and provides continuous feedback for developers, as well as includes the possibility to obtain the latest binary releases for end users.