Historically the build, like an installer, is a very low status job. So historically it goes to low status people, like the most junior developer on the team, or perhaps even a QA person. The result is that many build scripts, like many installers, more or less suck. I think this is more a reflection on the low status of the task than the skills of the person; there is just very little incentive for fixing a bad build. But that’s mostly because so few people have worked in environment with an excellent build they don’t know how much their missing.

We think that in the move to agile development your build can be a major blocker, or and that there are major productivity gains at stake, so it makes sense to approach your build engineering efforts as a serious task. We think this is a big enough problem with a big enough potential gain that we’ve organized a public Build Engineer Bootcamp for April 22nd-23rd in Minneapolis. Come and learn how to get your build system on a solid footing and then stay for CITCON (free, but separate registration) and learn about how to take your continuous integration and testing efforts to the limit.

Hope to see you there!

I’ve always intended to write a longish blog/article/thing explaining and expanding on the ideas from the original talk and what I’ve learned since (including what came up at the Agile 2007 discovery session). But this isn’t that thing. Instead David Smart, one of the facilitators of the CITCON session, reminded me that I said I’d share the slides. So here are the slides as pdf, and a public commitment to provide more explanation in a future entry.

I’m very curious to see how this year’s A-P CITCON plays out. Last year’s event in Sydney was our largest event to date, but this year we have even more people registered. In fact this seems like it will be the first event where we will need to close registration and turn people away! On the other hand the crowd in Sydney last year was also the least familiar with the Open Space concept. While it all turned out fine there was some rough spots (imho) when it came to activities like refactoring the schedule on Friday night. At most event there are enough people who understand the role of “schedule gnomes” to have things move smoothly without Paul and I getting involved, but in Sydney it took a bit of coaching to get that to happen. So I’m curious to see if with the larger crowd and the additional year we end up with a critical mass of people with Open Space experience or not.