Automation

We did some bits and pieces automation on one of our projects over the last few months. It impressed some managers at our customer, who then asked to start a separate project to do end-to-end automation.
We just finished the first iteration. Now, once you have stuff set-up and configured, the following things happen every night:

• the application is built and packaged.
• The install elements: war, database dump, sql scripts, install instructions, release notes get copied to a release folder. The release is named by the timestamp.
• The application is installed and configured on a remote machine.
• The application is started on the remote machine.
• Some automated code review tools are run, and reports generated in a nice consolidated format.
• Junit tests are run on the deployed application, and code coverage reports are generated.
  

So, the next morning, when the team comes in, they know if some things broke. They can also spend 15 minutes running through the code review reports and test the application for sanity.

If a formal release needs to be made, that is also a single command : you just specify the tag name, and all of the above happens. In addition, source also gets tagged.

What's next: integrating canoo web test or some other similar tool with the deployed application, so that the nightly build can also do the sanity tests.

Finally, we are getting close to becoming the cool dudes of automation!