Posted to cruisecontrol-user mailing list on 3/23/04.

Hi all,

I just wanted to post a short note about our success with CC.

I work at SAS, the largest privately owned software company in the world. ~10,000 employees world wide and about 1,800 developers at this site.

We've just moved all the Java code under CruiseControl. That's (approximately) five million lines of code and we are running on a single CPU box. We have several active branches on our code tree and only one is covered. We are planning another branch rollout in the next few weeks, and a third a few more weeks after that.

We do have a few tricks we are doing that let us scale to these numbers.

First, we have a build grid here, so you can just ask the grid to build a project and it finds an available machine and runs on it. (But even then, there are, if memory serves, 8 single cpu boxes, so it's not a massive infrastructure).

Secondly, we are using CVS triggers to touch a file and we monitor that file (instead of doing a CVS diff on 10 million lines of code every 10 minutes).

Lastly, we are running the multi-threaded version of CC (Jeffery has the code and it should get committed soon). This lets us take advantage of the build grid.

So far, it's gone off very smoothly. We have a (tentative) plan to move coverage to the C/C++ code in a few months. That would be another 10 million lines of code.

Our next major step is to use the modification set that watches the CC logs and run our automated test suites on various platforms.

Jared

This is fantastic - it's the largest, loudest applause for CC
that I've heard yet! I know what follows may sound like a menial task, but I think it would help the CC project immensely:

Expand this email into a "Case Study" suitable for posting on the CC website.

I think a [CaseStudy] should be easily readable by a manager, sales person, or even non-technical decision maker. It should include estimates of cost as well as time savings. I know each of us on the users list have already convinced our management of the benefits of continuous integration, but what about those who are still trying to get buy-in? This will help them - and that will help the CC project grow.

It doesn't need to me more than a page long. It would be nice to include dates, costs (estimated), and savings (estimated) if you can. Like "...with CC this project has gained 33% time savings as proved by reaching our deliverable 4 months early on a 12 month project...", etc.

I'm willing to help (editing, formatting, etc). In fact, if you just expand on each of the points below, I'll take it the rest of the way (final editing by you of course)! Let me know what you think.

-JonathanJulian