Since coming back to the USA from Ecuador, I haven’t had much opportunity to work on One Shore, QA Site, or any other projects. I hope that will change soon. I’ve been busy, well, moving back to the USA from Ecuador. Getting a job, finding a place to live, shopping for a boat, traveling back and forth to Montana to visit family and get stuff, and now needing to fix or sell and replace my truck which apparently has a blown head gasket. If I get the boat, replace or repair the car, and have a baby, then I should be set. Provided work doesn’t take all my time.
I got a job at Speakeasy in Seattle as a “Quality Assurance Engineer III” — a tester. I’m a bit disappointed to not be using my tools & process expertise, but I was excited to use STIQ, a tool that combines selenium and fitnesse (to disappointing affect — it doesn’t really take advantage of either) and work in VOIP, though predictably, I’m just testing webapps. It’s a full on “Agile” environment, which is interesting, but takes some getting used to. The first thing I wanted to do was write a “sticky note” application so that the information written on sticky notes (just about all that is written) doesn’t disappear when it’s stickyness fades (if not before.) 3M’s miracle glue is not a viable persistence solution for planning and documentation.
But I’m itching for tools, and prompted by cruisecontrol performance problems on linux to look at other build tools, I came across several positive reviews of Luntbuild and an interesting new (to me) build product called “Hudson.”
It passes the sniff test, installs easy (simply), looks pretty enough, and looks similar in design to Luntbuild with web configuration. I already like it’s AJAX svn repository verification step. More later.
Here’s a list of CI tools I’ve compiled:
CruiseControl
Continuum
Luntbuild
Anthill
Intellij – TeamCity
Atlassian – Bamboo
Cerberus – Ruby
Microsoft – VS Team System/Server/Suite/Foundation/whatever
In all fairness, someone’s comment about Sharepoint being the 80% tool is dead on. It does 80% of what all tools need out of the box, and about 80% of tools could be built easier based on it.
It’s sad that there is no OSS alternative among all the myriad of wikis, forums, file sharing, content management, collaboration, tools. It seems they all just want to parse their own dialect of wiki text or handle webmail. One thing they need is a sane user/group management. The other thing they need forms/workflow. The two solved problems out there are file sharing and rich text edit, but rarely together.
Fijiaaron 