Make QA Drops of Only Selected Builds In CruiseControl.Net

Question

CC.Net is creating many builds for us each day. Occasionally we do a bit of manual smoke testing and then a build becomes a QA drop (or release candidate if you prefer). QA drops are just copied to a remove server.

I'd like to automate the execution of the qa-drop-copy nant script, against an existing successful build. How can I do that? To phrase my question in a broader way, how are folks automating the publishing to QA of a single selection from the set of successful builds?

I envision something like an extra button with the label 'QA Drop' that can trigger the script. It might be next to the Force button (to publish that last build), or even available on each build report page (to publish any build).

Thanks, Josh

Answer 1

Hey Josh,

This is exactly how we have things set up within AnthillPro. On a build record, you have an extra button called "Run secondary process" that can be wired to things like deployments and functional test suites. Click that, select your process, your target environment and off you go.

How I've simulated this in other tools is to use the dependency widgets within the CI tool to have a QA deploy "project" that depends on the project I'd like to deploy. With most CI tools that support this, that approach mostly works when you are only deploying the most recent successful build.

That approach can work as long as all you want is to get to a QA environment. As you start having several processes to string together some sort of living build or pipeline management strategy is probably required - which may start moving you out of the open source CI tool space.

-- Eric