QuickBuild is designed to manage the whole build lifecycle. While developers can benefit from proof build and continuous integration, testers can benefit from QA build delivery, and release engineers can benefit from an automated software releasing procedure. With QuickBuild, builds can be delivered smoothly from developer to tester, and from tester to customer, in an automated, predictable and repeatable manner. During this process, arbitrary additional workflows can be applied to builds, and builds can be configured to be only accessible to certain role at certain stage.
Produce QA build and optionally deploy to test servers
QA builds can be generated against trunk or particular tags in SCM. Or you can promote a development build as QA build. You can tell QuickBuild to apply additional workflows to QA build, for example, tagging the SCM, deploying it to test servers, or notifying testers about availability of the build.
Recommend good builds
Builds can be marked as recommended to set it apart from other builds. For example, QA team can be assigned with the build recommend privilege and they can recommend passed QA build to mark it as gold build. QuickBuild can be configured to only promote recommended builds to next stage.
Promote good QA build as release build and optionally get it published on company web site
On QuickBuild platform, release engineer can promote gold QA build as release build to make it visible to the public. Again, arbitrary additional workflows can be applied here, for example to deploy the build to production server, to publish on company web site, or to tag the SCM for current release.
Compare different builds to get source changes
One can compare two builds to get source changes between them, either organized by commits, or by changed files, and view these changes directly within QuickBuild. This provides a convenient and powerful way to identify problem. For example, if some functionality is not working properly in current build, while it was working in a previous build, you may compare these two builds to know which files are changed and who has made these changes.
Flexible version strategy for QA and release builds
Different product may have different version strategy. Some products use the simplest "major.minor.patch" strategy, and some may want to include the date or SCM revision into the build version. Some products want to auto-increase certain part of the version at release time, and some may want to manually specify the version at release time. QuickBuild out of the box provides a simple version strategy by auto-increasing the last digit of the build version specified by user. However arbitrary complex version strategy can be implemented with simple inline scripting and variables. For example you may instruct QuickBuild to auto-generate version in form of "1.0 beta1, 1.0 beta2, 1.0 beta3...", while delivering beta builds of 1.0, and automatically revert back to use "1.1 beta1, 1.1 beta2, 1.1 beta3..." when 1.0 is released and your team start to deliver 1.1 betas.
Access build artifacts and project documents
Build artifacts and project documentations can be optionally published to QuickBuild artifact repository, and they can be accessed from QuickBuild web interface with permission control applied. Published artifacts can also be accessed by other projects to use as dependencies during the build process.
Statistics Chart
QuickBuild generates statistics chart for build duration and success rate to help you analyzing the build trends. You can compare at most 4 configurations at a time, and can group the data by version, by day, by week or by month. Below is a typical statistics chart which shows the comparison between 4 configurations:
Generate custom statistics chart for user defined metrics. You needn't write any plugins for QuickBuild to achieve this, just go to QuickBuild web interface and do some configuration.
Build auto cleanup strategy to reduce disk space usage
Frequent continuous integration may generate many builds over time. This may occupy a lot of disk space. While you can clean up builds manually, QuickBuild provides build auto-cleanup functionality to delete builds and their artifacts automatically if number of builds exceeds a certain threshold or if the build is old enough.
