John Dempsey, the founder and editor of SoftwareEngineering.info, was interviewed
for an article on build management for MergerMarket.com.
Below is the text of his full interview with MergerMarket.com.
MergerMarket.com: What is build management?
Mr. Dempsey:
Build management products help programmers to automate the process of compiling code and
generating the executable program for a specific version of software.
Some products "help" with this process, while other products can generate the actual executable program for a given release.
Who do you consider some of the leaders in build management?
To know the leaders, you first need to know who the players are.
On our web site http://SoftwareEngineering.info, we identify 12 commercial products and 26 public domain or free tools for build management.
In our view, the commercial leaders today are Urbancode's Anthill Pro, BuildForge's FullControl, Electric Cloud,
Atozed Computer Software's FinalBuilder, Telelogic's Synergy/CM ObjectMake, Codefast's Perfect Build, and
Kinook Software's Visual Build Professional products.
As for public domain/free tools, the leaders are the standard Unix "make" utility, GNU Make, The Apache Ant Project, and
SourceForge BusyB Project.
Why do you think the larger developer tools companies have not made build management a major focus?
I think most vendors focused on one area initially to get established in the marketplace, e.g.,
creating a configuration management tool or bug tracking tool.
But now that their product is in wide spread use, it's hard for them to make major changes to their existing
products to accommodate a new area such as build management.
What do you think of BuildForge?
BuildForge is taking build management to the next level.
For companies who need to support products on multiple platforms or need more than what "make" or make-like utilities can offer,
BuildForge's FullControl may very well be their answer.
For applications which are sold on numerous platforms, tools like BuildForge are essential.
Do you think BuildForge has a strong enough product that could be attractive to companies like Borland, IBM?
I do.
BuildForge has done a nice job in creating a build management product.
Good products should attract a lot of attention from everyone, including Borland and IBM.
Are there news groups for build management?
SoftwareEngineering.info supports a number of news groups and does have one specifically for build management.
Anyone can participate in our newsgroups.
What does the future hold for build management?
Seamless integration with other areas.
Today if a company can integrate configuration management, problem tracking, and build management together,
they are considered advanced.
But the future will be to integrate these areas with additional areas such as project management,
data repositories, unit and regression testing, software reuse, HTML report generation,
metrics, and reverse engineering all presented to the user in a unified and seamless graphical interface.
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