Mobile Phones Get Smaller, Software Builds Get Bigger

The feature and form-factor war in mobile handsets has generated a growing headache for developers of software for mobile devices: Longer and longer compile times have been met with shorter and shorter release cycles. At the same time, feature proliferation has made build times grow longer. This math obviously does not add up.

Case in point: One of the leading global developers of wireless telecommunication products found itself with a build matrix so complex that the build team at one business unit had more than 100 unique software builds to support at any given time. At the same time that complexity was increasing, build times had increased dramatically, such that a single build grew from 20 minutes to more than two hours in just two years. Multiply that by 100 unique builds and the usual overnight build cycle was just not feasible.

To address this bottleneck, the company turned to parallel builds enabled, in this case, by Electric Cloud (www.electric-cloud.com). The wireless company quickly achieved an 84 percent reduction in build speed while enabling engineers to make incremental code changes they avoided in the past due to long compile times. They're now running 30-40 simultaneous builds during peak times of the day with more than 500 developers building to a cluster of 288 CPUs (432 build agents) at one site alone. They've now rolled out parallel build clusters across four sites in three countries.

—DDJ