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Continuous integration was one of the original twelve XP practices introduced in Kent Beck's book Extreme Programming Explained, back in 1999. It was designed to solve a specific and acute problem in the software development process: making sure that when an individual developer completes new functionality, or makes a change to the code, the software as a whole still works. Continuous integration requires that every time a developer writes some code, he or she builds the software and runs some tests on a non-development environment to make sure that his or her changes haven't broken anything. If done manually this process can be error-prone and time consuming, so it needs to be automated. The upshot is that to do continuous integration well, you need an automated build and a set of automated tests, and once the team is large enough, a continuous integration server to run them for you every time a developer submits code. Thus, CruiseControl and its many siblings were born. read more

Greetings Minglers New and Old,

It is our pleasure to announce that Mingle 2.0 is now generally available.

The last 9 months have been a labor of love for us, as we have worked to develop a fine piece of software with your input. It makes us proud to say that a broad community of our colleagues and customers from around the world has influenced Mingle through their own project experiences. read more

With Mingle's new feature, Card Trees, we are breaking new ground in how a team can visualize project complexity. We have built into Mingle the power to visually define parent-child relationships between cards on your project and tools to capture metrics at any level and aggregate them according to the hierarchies you design. Because Mingle does the work of crunching the data, you can spend time doing what you do best: working with your team rather than spreadsheets. read more

CruiseControl Enterprise Best Practices, part 4 In my last post I demonstrated using a bootstrapper to make sure that the configuration for CruiseControl was up to date. I'd like to expand on that in this post. Here's the question that led to the creation of the Bootstrappers in CruiseControl: How do you fix the build when you have broken your build files? read more

At ThoughtWorks, we’ve had a strong tradition of innovation with functional testing. We’ve always viewed testing as a collaborative, team activity, involving domain experts, developers, and testers. However, we believe that we have a long way to go before we achieve testing nirvana. The current set of functional testing tools all have their own strengths, weaknesses, and gotchas. Over the past decade, development tools have got more and more sophisticated. In contrast, however, functional testing tools seem to have missed the party. We believe that the time is right for a next generation functional testing tool. A team at ThoughtWorks Studios has been hard at work, and we believe we do have something that pushes the envelope of functional testing.

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You just started using CruiseControl. You use a Version Control System to manage your code. You installed CruiseControl on a spare computer in the office; now it is giving you immediate feedback on the changes that occur in that codebase. Life is good. Then the disk on that spare computer fails, and your build server resumes its previous role as a doorstop.

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During the last 3 months, we have had the pleasure of releasing the first public version of Mingle and receiving an enormous amount of feedback from those people who downloaded it. What has been an even greater joy for us has been to be able to develop and release for you, version 1.1 of Mingle, only three months later. read more

ThoughtWorks wants Ruby to win. By 'win', I mean become a major software development language, where it is the default choice for many application types. What I don't mean by 'win' is to beat some other specific language, particularly the dynamic languages like Python, Groovy, etc..., which we believe offer clear advantages in terms of Agile software development. read more

The average Java project has many dependencies - open source tools and frameworks, third party libraries, libraries that come from your project or organization - the list is endless. I just counted 84 jar files that my current project depends on (or may depend on!). Much pain can come from the way you manage these dependencies. Sometimes it's harder than you think to make software build or execute if it's not clear what the dependencies are. read more

Here's special contest for people attending RailsConf Europe. We want to have a little fun with JRuby and Java interop. So, we've modified the game from the Java Game Book, and put a little RubyWorks spin on it. We've provided some examples, which you can see running in our booth, of how to control the game via JRuby. read more

I'm an Infrastructure Specialist at ThoughtWorks. In this series of blog posts I hope to pass on my top ten tips for using CruiseControl Enterprise effectively. I hope that anybody who is interested in Continuous Integration will get something from these articles. read more

Recently, we conducted the ThoughtWorks San Francisco Code Jam at our offices in the South of Market district. Check out this video and let us know what you think! read more

It is our pleasure to announce that Mingle is now available for purchase by the general public. We invite you to register and download a copy of Mingle and let us know what you think. read more

The Early Access release of Mingle is now available! If you have registered interest in Mingle, expect to receive an email soon with details on how to download and start using Mingle. read more