ThoughtWorks launches CruiseControl Enterprise

ThoughtWorks has launched a CruiseControl Enterprise project to enhance and support CruiseControl, the grand-daddy of Continuous Integration servers. The enhancements shown include an enterprise dashboard, build summary and build detail. The release of these features is estimated for June 2007.

ThoughtWorks will also offer 24x7 support (pricing starts at USD$15,000 for a support pack of 5 incidents) and continuous integration consulting (priced based on need).

A paper by Dave Farley describes the pattern where many continuous integration environments stop at the build stage, rather than continuing on to deployment and beyond and suggests a gated approach to explorinb beyond 'continuous build'.

InfoQ took the opportunity to speak with with Paul Julius, the Product Manager for CruiseControl Enterprise, and one of the original founders of CruiseControl.

When asked to describe the relationship between the open-source CruiseControl project and CruiseControl enterprise, and how ThoughtWorks will be contributing to the community, Paul described a dedicated development and support team:

They are working on the updated reporting application as we speak. Everything we are building now will be open sourced. The development team will be joining into the existing open source community to contribute code, review patches, answer user & developer questions, etc. As the roadmap for the enterprise class CI features gets defined, they will be working on those features.

As the enterprise-specific features are created, they will become proprietary extensions to the open source version of CruiseControl. Until then, there is no plan to create a separate CruiseControl Enterprise product distribution.

These [proprietary] extensions will be largely focused on the needs of large enterprise continuous integration environments. Those features which are more broadly applicable to projects without regard for size will continue to be open sourced. The open source community itself will continue to advance CruiseControl, too. Patches continue to come in. New ideas continue to get proposed. The OSS community continues to thrive and have a life of its own.

Speaking about the plans for CruiseControl Enterprise, Paul described changes for the next release:

• Visibility into in-progress builds (i.e. seeing the Ant output via the reporting application)
• Cleaner data summarization.
• Enriched user interface that takes advantage of features like Ajax.
• Ability to add standard projects quickly and entirely via the reporting application.
• Ability to update CruiseControl's configuration via the reporting application. This has been available before, via JMX and a rudimentary text field. It will now be part of the same framework as the other administration tasks and provide some validation to limit errors.
• Ability to create reporting application "widgets" (e.g. panopticode integration) which summarize build output data. In the past this was accomplished via XSLT. The new widget framework provides the full flexibility of the Java programming language.
• Backwards compatibility via RSS and XML feeds so that we don't break all the existing 3rd party tools, like CC Tray, Yahoo Widget, etc.

He also talked about the long-term roadmap:

The roadmap for the upcoming releases will focus on simplifying the creation and administration of enterprise class CI environments. The details of what that will entail are still being ironed out.

On the subject of which challenges are more common in enterprise use of continuous integration:

Large enterprises are faced with integration across potentially hundreds of projects, some active and some legacy. Keeping all these projects in synch and correctly built, tested and deployed with each other can be extremely complex. Simpler Java issues serial version UID errors can cause significant problems in a production environment. More complex problems, like exhaustive regression test suites that take 12 hours or more to run, can reduce the rapidity of feedback for developers, testers and managers.

CruiseControl Enterprise offers solutions now for these problems, but will continue to add in new features to support these types of environments. ThoughtWorks' experience with decomposing an integration environment into a pipeline from development through to production enables big enterprises to make decisions more effectively, resolve problems more quickly and reduce their overall time to market.