Rocket Surgery

You know how there are “man crushes” and “girl crushes?”  I’ve got a serious code crush on Hudson.  My latest manifestation of this infatuation with this wonderful tool is that I have convinced my co-workers in a vastly C#/ASP.NET shop to stop using CruiseControl.net and Visual Source Safe and to switch to Hudson and Subversion.

This group used to have a huge, single, magic NAnt script that would check one of six projects out of VSS based on parameters sent in, build the project, and publish it to a development server.  Now, Hudson does the checkout from Subversion and the deployment, and the NAnt script just calls MSBuild or zips things up into deployable units.  Next we are going to hook in FXCop to do static code analysis on their stuff and have the problems reported and graphed using the violations plugin (which also reports our Checkstyle and PMD violations on the Java side), and show trends for their NUnit tests.

And the really nice thing is that everyone can use one dashboard to view both the Java and the .NET development efforts.  Great for transparency and accountability.

I recently set up StatSVN at my workplace. It’s a great tool for getting statistics from your Subversion repository - which in case you didn’t know, has a great deal of rich data regarding your team’s activity that can be extracted by analyzing source code activity. You can get very nice graphs of activity over time, check-in activity by author, churn (the amount of repeated check-in of the same files), proportion of adds versus updates, even things like which days of the week or hours of the day get the most repository activity.
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