What we really need is a tool that can distribute builds to different machines. Fortunately most of the commercial continuous integration servers do support this kind of feature. Most of them use some sort of a server/agent based concept to distribute builds. Thoughtworks provides a good overview of several CI products that are available on the market. I decided to have a deeper look at Cruise, the enterprise version of Cruise Control from Thoughtworks.
So I downloaded the free edition of Cruise 1.1 and installed it on my laptop. Cruise consists of a server (Cruise Server) and several agents (Cruise agents), that receive work delegated from the server. Therefore a build can be processed in parallel by several cruise agents. What I really liked about Cruise is their implementation of the concept of the deployment pipeline. Cruise allows monitoring of changes to an application as they progress from initial check-in to functional testing, performance testing, user acceptance testing, staging, and release. A pipeline consists of one ore more stages which again consists of jobs. You can consider a pipeline configuration as a workflow of a particular release process. In that way Cruise goes beyond basic continuous integration that many products support these days.
What's interesting is that not every state transition has to be automatically triggered. Some stages may be manually approved before the release process can go further. For instance, in my current project most of the tests are accomplished manually by domain experts outside of the development team. During an iteration or at the end of an iteration we provide builds for manuall testing. In Cruise, this process could be implemented by a stage that needs manual approval.
When I hit Cruise's dashboard for the first time I was disappointed about the few features the product seemed to provide. The main page has just four tabs for viewing the current activity, managing pipelines and agents and a administration tab. Everything looked so minimalistic. But when I begun to use it, I was surprised that most of the things I wanted to do I could do.
But there are some negative points too. In the current version 1.1 they just support Subversion, Mercurial, Git and Perforce for source control integration. There are some other features that are missing in comparison to CruiseControl.NET. There is no support for visualizing reports from tools like FxCop or NCover, just NUnit is supported. They don't provide a plugin mechanism like Cruise Control. So there is currently no contribution or self extension possible.
To summarize, Cruise looks very promising for me. I really liked the concept of pipelines and the minimalistic user interface. From a CruiseControl.NET user perspective there are some key features missing in the current version 1.1. But I'm sure that the agile guys from Thoughtworks will soon come out with a new version that may include those missing features.
