Windows Developer Power Tools

12.0 Introduction

At several points in this book, we harp on the concept that your software development cycle should be treated as a value stream, an idea first proposed by Tom and Mary Poppendieck in their book Lean Software Development (Addison-Wesley). Your development process, whether it’s simple or complex, offers opportunities for adding value to your software by improving quality, cutting time, cutting the chance of error, and creating repeatable, structured processes for the larger cycle.

The build phase of the development cycle is one of the ripest for injecting value, because of the many steps involved from development to getting your software packaged and out the door to your customers. These include:

• Retrieving the latest version of your software from source control

• Building that version as a release and creating debug (.pdb) files

• Building a deployment or distribution package and deploying it to your test environment

• Running unit, integration, and acceptance tests against it

• Running any required reports against the software (metrics, testing, quality, etc.)

• Tagging or otherwise marking the source-control repository to note the release

• Storing the release version with its debug files in your version-control or archive system

• Deploying or distributing the software to your customers

In spite of its length, the preceding list offers a simplistic overview of the process!

If performed manually, each step in that list is a time sink and a potential source of errors. Are you sure you ...