Continuous integration and Hudson

For my ics 413 class we were just introduced to continuous integration. We were introduced to this topic because we are going to be working in groups on this upcoming assignment. In groups projects, big changes to software can lead to problems since those changes may not be compatible with other group members code. Continuous integration is an idea where programmers of software projects make small changes to projects then committing those small changes. The continuous integration environment that my 413 class is using will be Hudson.

Hudson is a system that helps software development by continually building and testing projects. Hudson will monitor my groups SVN repository by building and testing new project updates. Anytime a group member commits something new to the SVN repository, Hudson builds and verifies the project. If any build or test fails, an email would be sent out to everyone working on the project saying that the project failed to build. Anytime there is a failed build, it should be immediately fixed. The Hudson system is very useful since it verifies a project just in case one of the group members forgot to.

Hudson was very simple to setup and use since most of the instructions were given to us in a webcast. If I were to do it on my own, I think that it wouldn't be too hard since there are instructions all over the internet. The only problem that I had while setting up Hudson for my group was that I didn't set the automatic build field, so Hudson looked for a file in a folder that didn't exist, so the build kept failing. Other than that user error, everything else in the setup was straightforward.