OpenMake Meister

What is a Workflow

 

A Workflow is a series of activities performed before and after a software build (the compile and link process.)  For this reason, Workflow management is often called “build management”. It is important to note that Workflow management does nothing to manage calls to compilers and linkers. This is the function of Build Automation, perfomed thorugh Build Services, not Workflow management.  Workflow management coordinates a series of activites to be executed as a single process.  An activity can be any sort of Command Line process for your operating system, such as executing a build with OpenMake Meister, Maven, Make or Ant, calling a source-code-management (SCM) tool, executing static code analysis, sending emails or running test.  Workflow management is very similar to job scheduling

Out of the box, there are many pre-defined  Workflow Activities from which users can choose to develop the pre and post steps of their Workflows. Workflow Activities can be customized or  pre-defined  application lifecycle plug-ins can be used thus eliminating the user’s need to re-invent the process for every application lifecycle tool.

The Workflow Editor accessible via the Eclipse RCP is the primary user interface used for developing Workflows and their associated Workflow Activities.  The Workflow Editor also allows you to streamline your Workflow by defining relationships between Workflow Activities through chaining. With “chained” Workflow Activities, you can define your pre build and post build Workflow Activities to execute in a particular order as well as execute across Remote Agents and Server Pools in both a distributed or parallelized process.  To further simplify Workflow Activity execution, environment variable configuration can be managed based on each Workflow Activity or through templates and global profiles.