Team Pace Keeping Build Times Down

The use of automated build and continuous integration systems by software teams is a well-established practice, and has been shown to provide significant benefits. However, to qualify the value of continuous integration practices it is necessary to to compare their cost with the associated benefit. When considering automated builds or continuous integration in an agile team, this cost is the time taken by developers to run the build script and automated tests before code can be committed and/or deployed. This paper discusses the effect of this time on team behaviour by comparing two projects with significantly different build times.