Back in early 2000, a ThoughtWorks software development team was marching toward some very aggressive deadlines on a very demanding project. They didn't have the time to stop and do lengthy integration testing every fortnight. Nor did they have the time (or the appetite) to leave it until the end.

In fact, there were a number of challenging issues on that project. So the team hired a bearded consultant (Martin Fowler) to come in and help them out. When he described the concept of Continuous Integration (CI) to them, they immediately took the practice on board.

But the team soon grew tired of doing the same manual tasks over and over again. And they grew even more tired of fixing the mistakes they made while doing these boring tasks.

Before long, they'd had enough. So they set about automating the tasks. They created a bunch of scripts and tools to do many of the tasks for them. And that left them with only a few basic practices to follow in order to get the same result.

Once they delivered the project, ThoughtWorks thought their automated system and its related practices might be useful for other projects. So we cleaned them up and made them available as the CruiseControl open source project. And the bearded consultant, along with Matt Foemmel, wrote a paper about the practices.

Since then, CruiseControl has been maintained and evolved by a large and active open source community. With over 200,000 downloads, it has now grown to be pretty much synonymous with the concept of Continuous Integration. And it's the tool of choice for over 3,000 enterprises.
 
Of course, there are many reasons for this. And there is also one simple underpinning truth: CruiseControl is built and maintained by people who actually make a living doing enterprise software development, everyday.

A good tool comes from a real need to get things done. People who experience enterprise joy and pain first hand know what features a good enterprise tool really needs. The same people can typically smell 'bloatware' a mile away - they've experienced enough of it - so they also know which features to leave out.

As ThoughtWorks Studios puts out new tools to scratch our enterprise itches, we're staying true to this approach.

And CruiseControl Enterprise is our focused effort to continue down this path with CruiseControl. We'll be continuing to work with enterprises all over the world to implement CI more broadly across their IT departments. And we'll also be helping our customers extend CI to the entire release process with our Deployment Pipeline practices. While we're doing that, we'll be mining new requirements for CruiseControl, and where it makes sense, we'll be adding them in as new features.

So on the one hand, its business as usual and there's nothing new about CruiseControl Enterprise. But on the other, there is one fairly major difference: a good tool comes from a real need to get things done - and now we have a focused team to help advance the tool.