Scaling CI and Improving Build Management

Erin Curtis is the Director of Product Management at Electric Cloud, a company that provides build automation and management software.  Before "cloud" became a major buzzword in the IT industry, Electric Cloud had their own internal cloud for software builds.  Over time they added support for the entire build and release lifecycle on VMs and Amazon EC2.

Curtis explains why it's important for developers to do pre-flight builds and tests before production.  If an organization has a lot of developers and projects, continuous integration can end up being a system of continuously broken builds.  Curtis also discusses how Electric Cloud can run massively parallel builds using their dependency management software.  She says that organizations should automate as much of the build and release lifecycle as possible.