Circumventing Build Process

Another example, might be that the person making the decision to circumvent the build process does not understand the implications of their decision. conception to release.

How organizations decide to handle it is where this can become a SCM War Story.

Circumventing the Build Process Antipattern

The software project is behind schedule. Customers are impatiently demanding the new release. Pressure to circumventing build process.

Everyone in the software industry can identify with this situation.

The Background

• Large development team 250+ developers
• 5 geographical locations
• 9,500,000 lines of code
• Build can take days to complete
• Testing can take several days to complete

The Story

• The project is months late
• There is a candidate release and testing is looking great
• Plans are made for this to be the release

The Rub

• A critical bug is found
• A critical decision must be made
• Do we fix the bug for this release or create a patch for the customer
• It looks bad to ship a software product and days later require your customers to patch your product
• However, it will take a full day to rebuild and several more to retest everything

The Decision

• Bastardize the build so we can short-circut the testing phase

The Results

• The company was able to ship the product two days earlier by not doing to full build and testing
• However, by manually messing with the build process a piece was missed
• The customers who attempted to upgrade broke their systems
• An emergency patch needed to be created
• The customers were very angry. Many threatening to move to competitors product
• Company reputation damaged

The Lesson's Learned

• Follow the automated build process
• Complete all testing after every build

Best Practice	Description
Follow the Automated Build Process	This may sound obvious, but Do Not Circumvent the Automated Build Process By following the automated build process you ensure Build Integrity Reproducibility Build Repeatability Automated Build Process