Improving Enterprise Build Process Using a Workflow Driven Approach in a Distributed Environment

Continuous Integration (CI) is widely adopted as an efficient practice for code integration. CI advocates frequent integrations to the version control system to mitigate the "integration hell" problem. The CI process ensures that the binaries are always up to date by performing a build for every set of developer submissions. Since the developer submissions to CI are processed in a queued manner, an inevitable drawback is the time taken to verify the successful integration of submissions. Hence providing a quick feedback about the success or failure of the submissions may not be possible all the time which may lead to increased turnaround time for failed submissions and reduced developer productivity. This paper discusses an approach to provide a faster feedback about the successful integration of submissions by utilizing the power of distributed computing. This can ensure a higher success rate of integrations in the CI process and can substantially bring down the turnaround time for integrations that fail.