Your Build Process Shouldn't Drive You Nuts!

Build Systems can be anchors or accelerators to developer productivity, properly layered architectures, and smooth deployment.

A well written build system integrates tightly, yet flexibly with test frameworks, dev/qa&production machine provisioning, source code management (SCM), and deployment infrastructure.

A well written build system enables rapid on-boarding of new engineers by providing extremely simple procedures for development and test environment set-up, together with auto-generated, code-linked, and up-to-date system documentation.

A well written build system builds the minimum necessary -- in parallel where possible; it  manages component dependencies, ensures compliance with organizational coding standards, and provides operations teams, architects and managers with the logging, tracing, and reporting tools they need to answer questions such as:

• what areas of my code base are overly complex, and potentially in need of refactoring?
• what areas of my code base have inadequate test coverage, or are responsible for more than their share of defects?
• what is the source code version number of the component currently crashing crashing our production servers, who signed off on QA for this, and who checked it in? 

We Deliver Systems You Can Swear By, Not At

Our mission at the Labs is to deliver release engineering solutions that meet the above requirements... that enable you to be more agile, to deploy faster, and to work fewer late nights.


What kind of engineering team do you need to pull this off?  A comprehensive understanding of build automation-related open source frameworks (and continual contribution to and involvement with open source projects)  is the entry ticket. To truly excel in this area you need the perspective of those who have worked as managers or software architects, and who have had the experience of a build system slowing them down, or in some instances, helping them deliver faster. Such experience lets you know what has to be done better. The open source expertise enables you to actually deliver.

Who We Are

Chris Bedford founded the Labs in 2008.

As an individual contributor and engineering manager, Chris has played key roles in the development of a broad spectrum of award-winning products, in areas ranging from enterprise software and Eclipse tooling, to mobile applications. 

Projects

OSGI & Eclipse Builds with Maven Tycho

We recently worked with a major Fortune 500 company to create a prototype build system for OSGI/Eclipse plug-ins using the Tycho Maven plug-in. In the course of this project we learned a lot about Tycho and the architecture of Maven 3.0 (currently under development).  We think Tycho is a much better solution for Eclipse builds than the traditional ant/PDE headless build approach. 


Maven and Hudson Internal Documentation

When you work on extending and trouble shooting open source build frameworks like Maven and Hudson .it helps to have some good documenation. Our internal documentation is a work-in-progress that will get more comprehensive and more automated over time.


Customized Cygwin Update Sites

This project is one of a number of initiatives we are undertaking to enable our clients to automate the set up of their build and development environments. For details, please see this page.


The Build Lackey Labs Provisionator

The Provisionator automates the installation and setup of the third party frameworks and utilities needed to build, test, and deploy industrial strength Java applications.