What is the initial cost of setting up CruiseControl?

Question

What is the initial cost of setting up CruiseControl?

Answer 1

How do you define 'cost'? It's free to download so there's no monetary cost.

In terms of time it should take between 1/2 - 1 day, depending on how complicated your configuration is.

Answer 2

Not more than two to three hours worth if you're new to it. The first time I used it I had something that checked out the latest version from subversion, compiled it using MSBuild and then upload it in less than that time.

Answer 3

It takes a little while to get it up and running - but you can get a solution to build using the task to build you .sln file in less than a day if you're a complete newbie on the subject.

It gets a little more complicated when you add unit testing in various frameworks, costumizing the dashboard, labelling your builds etc but it's a matter of days, not weeks to get anything up and running.

Answer 4

I'd recoccomend a dedicated machine for cruise control, it doesn't have to be amazingly powerful but bear in mind it had to be able to compile your code.

We used an old developer's machine, which was put aside after an upgrade.

As far as the cost in time a day should have you up and running.

Answer 5

The key point here is not the time you have to invest in setting up CruiseControl. You can do this in an hour or so. The question is weather do you have a code repository (SVN, TFS) and a build script ready (something - MSBuild script or so - that will clean, rebuild, test and deploy your app). If not you will have to invest some time in that - depending on how complicated your project is - but surely it will take a lot more time than setting up a CruiseControl server.

Answer 6

If you have a simple project with no dependencies then a couple of hours. If you are actually doing 'integration' of many projects with many dependencies then several weeks and possibly code changes. IMHO CC.Net doesn't scale well to large numbers of projects...

Answer 7

I'd recommend Hudson over CruiseControl any day of the week. I can't think of anything CruiseControl can do which Hudson doesn't do (better). Especially the web-based frontend is far superior. You can run Hudson directly on your machine (using JNLP) and have your project setup in minutes.

Answer 8

You should be able to set it up in about 3 hours and it's totally free.

Still you can spend money on external tools like Simian etc, but that's totally optional. Setting up CCnet really is a matter of going through the configuration documentation and that's it.

I blogged about my experiences with CCnet before: http://www.tigraine.at/2008/10/08/another-take-on-contiuous-integration/

Answer 9

Software - free.

Hardware - cost depends. If you only want to run nightly it can probably share server space with something else. We use a dedicated server with builds every 15 mins.

Set up time - Once learnt you're looking at a few hours to set up a new server. If you're new to CC allow a day or two.

If you've never used an integration server before you're going to have a learning curve for the entire team - allow a few weeks.

We've recently moved to a new server and we set up a fresh installation - it took a few hours. That's for four projects, two different source control providers, and includes custom tasks like reporting and building help files.

Answer 10

Jay Flowers runs a project called CI Factory which enables you to put together a CruiseControl.NET installation with optional modules in no time at all.

http://jayflowers.com/joomla/

Also, you might wish to listen to the .NET rocks podcast interview with him:

http://www.dnrtv.com/default.aspx?showID=64