Every so often, I have someone telling me that setting up CruiseControl is hard. Invariably, when I probe more, it turns out that setting CruiseControl up is easy - it only takes a few minutes to turn out a config file that works. The issue is that they don't have a build script that does something useful. Parabuild suffers from the same problem - if you don't have a decent build script, you can't get decent automated builds.

Lasse, Thanks for reflecting on our message :) There was no point to withdraw Parabuild's name from it because the message is true. Parabuild does roll out clean daily/nightly builds even if the head of the codeline is broken. So, yes, it tries to fix thing that people screwed. As for the rest, I totally agree that engineers need to follow simple rules to really benefit from continuous integration. Mine top ones are a) don't go home till you see your checkin has produced a clean build b) don't check in after 5PM. You may find more on avoidable build breakage patterns here: http://www.viewtier.com/support/articles/continuous_integration_build_breakage_patterns.htm Regards,

Robert, thankyou for the clarification. However, when starting to put up the CruiseControl run, we did already have the Ant script doing what we wanted: CVS checkout, clean build with Clover instrumentation, test run with Clover, and generating the Clover reports.

The problem was that when setting CruiseControl to run this in the build loop, the build kept crashing in OutOfMemoryErrors. As I said, I don't mean to imply that this would be CruiseControl's fault; nor am I interested in finding the guilty one, but rather in getting Lahtinen and the machine gun back, as Hietanen very well puts it in a Finnish classic.

When tuning the VM and various Ant and CC parameters, I found out that we were not alone. Don't get me wrong, I think that CruiseControl is a great tool, but I like it better served with only moderate hype ;) It can easily be more work to set it up in a big project to do non-trivial things (such as the Clover runs) than what is being done in tutorials.