Pre-Commit Builds with Meister

Pre-commit builds are for building newly engineered changes and validating that code integration, unit testing and the build itself are successful before committing those code changes to a shared repository. Pre-commit builds prevent situations where an isolated code change breaks the team, continuous or nightly build.  Breaking the central build delays schedules by impeding code releases to the testing and production environments.  Broken builds can cause projects to come to a halt until the build is addressed, and corrected.

Pre-commit builds give the software engineer more responsibility and control over changes submitted to a project, while delivering higher overall quality. A project whose changes are submitted by multiple developers using sound Pre-commit builds will have improved on-time delivery to test and production environments. This is because there will be less chance that someone has introduced a change that breaks a standard validation test such as a unit test or at worst, the build itself.

The build is a critical part of the Pre-commit validation process, but other validation checks can be done. A Pre-commit workflow can include a build and other test and validation checks. Some systems, such as Perl and other scripting systems, do not require a separate build step, but can still benefit from Pre-commit validation checks.

Meister allows you to execute your Pre-commit workflow from within your Eclipse, Microsoft Visual Studio, or other IDE. The workflow execution is actually independent of the IDE and runs externally using the omsubmit program. This provides you with the advantages of executing the same workflow inside or outside of the IDE. For builds, this means that you are no longer locked into an IDE build and can execute the same build, Pre-commit, that is executed for the team project build.