AccuRev and Electric Cloud announced a technology partnership designed to improve software development productivity and efficiency.  The combined solution, which integrates the automated build, test and deployment functionality of Electric Cloud’s ElectricCommander software with process-enabled software configuration management (SCM) using AccuRev, advances multistage continuous integration and scalable agile best practices. 

Multi-stage continuous integration is employed to build and test changes as they are pushed to each stage in the development process – stages include code creation, integration, quality assurance and code reviews. AccuRev supports the creation of a hierarchy, gives visibility into the changes at each stage and enables straightforward merging between stages. ElectricCommander provides the process automation to make multi-stage continuous integration scalable and repeatable.

“Cliff Utstein, AccuRev vice president of marketing, said, “Continuous integration and automated build/release processes are the backbone of shorter iterations and agile best practices. AccuRev software is designed to enable these processes out-of-the-box, making a technology partnership with Electric Cloud a natural fit for AccuRev by completing the solution for software development teams.” 

For medium or large software development projects, a full integration build and test can take hours, during which time developers can check in additional changes to their SCM tool that may cause a build or test failure. The risk of build failure increases exponentially as the number and locations of developers grow.  In a continuous integration environment, build failures have an immediate impact on the productivity of entire development teams as the problem is diagnosed and fixed.

The integration between ElectricCommander and AccuRev solves this problem by combining and extending several continuous integration best practices:
ElectricCommander is an enterprise-class solution for automating and managing the software build-test-deploy process. It is language- and build tool-agnostic, and makes this process more repeatable, more transparent, and more efficient, whether teams use Java, Ant, C/C++, Make, etc.  ElectricCommander distributes individual jobs or job steps in parallel across multiple servers for faster throughput and efficient resource utilization. Unlike traditional “continuous integration servers,” ElectricCommander has an extensible and secure 3-tier architecture that can scale to manage any size project or development organization. It will also help teams respond nimbly to change, requiring minimal changes to existing build or test scripts.

AccuRev integrated with ElectricCommander facilitates a multistage continuous integration environment by automating event-triggered builds at different stages of a team’s development release process represented in the AccuRev stream-based GUI. AccuRev streams act as temporary buffers and changes linger only as long as necessary. The result is that the impact of a build or test breaking change is limited to just a single team instead of all development teams typical of continuous integration in mainline development, with zero changes to a developer’s day to day activities.

“We’re finding more and more that enterprises are tying best of breed development tools together to provide a unified workflow,” said Jim Bell, Electric Cloud vice president of marketing. “ElectricCommander provides a robust automation layer that can unify tools, people and processes. This integration with AccuRev will help organizations to not only enable continuous integration, but provide end-to-end traceability from source code, through the build and test process, to deployed application.”