Thursday, May 29, 2008

Adding an Organization Hierarchy in Team Build


We really like Team Build. Especially Team Build 2008 which has the continuous integration ability. However any good product can always be improved.

To the left you'll see a screen shoot of one of our Team Projects and the builds under it. You can't see them all but there are 42 build definitions setup. Having them all in a flat view can be a bit overwhelming. Adding the ability to group these build types would be very cool. For example, the DownloadServlet builds might be under a folder called \Team Builds\DownloadServlet. Builds that run the Unit tests could be grouped as well.

The feedback I'm expecting is, why didn't we just break these out into separate Team Projects. Separate Team Projects would build the organization that I'm suggesting. While valid, we have hundreds if not thousands of "applications" to support. Most of them are supported by sub-groups in the company. For example, the applications behind these build types are all worked on by one group. We find it easier to group the applications together in one Team Project instead of all having autonomous Team Projects. We do the same for other groups and it works very well.

What are your thoughts? Would adding the ability to "group" build types be advantageous for other teams?

4 comments:

Unknown said...

I'm desperately in need of that functionality as well - just the ability to group builds into folders in the UI. It would be nice to be able to grant permissions to folder levels, assign build agents (or collections of etc) but really all I need is folders - or even the illusion of them...

Slava Imeshev said...

Martin,

You might check Viewtier's Parabuild. It provides display groups (folders) for nice arrangement of build configurations according to your preferences.

Unknown said...

Yep, +1 on this one.

Mac Noland said...

Thanks for all the feedback guys! Since you guys seem to have a simlar need (or want), I've posted this to Connect. Feel free to vote.