Cruise Control .NET time build spends in failed state

Question

My team has a goal to minimize the amount of time that our build is broken.

We use CruiseControl.NET for continuous integration. What I'd like to find out is how best to approach answering the following question:

"In the last {timespan}, how much time has {project-name} spent in a broken status?"

For example: "Over the last 1 month, how much time has our project spent in a broken status?"

Are there any advanced features of CruiseControl.NET that would facilitate making this information available in some type of a report or somewhere in the dashboard?

Alternatively, how would you approach parsing the xml artifact files to glean this info?

Answer 1

Having had a very quick look at the CC docs, I imagine if you were writing your own Cruise control dashboard, you could consume the RSS feed of build results, parse in all the date times and success/failure states up to your threshold, then sum up the totals.

As for displaying it in a dashboard, I think Cruise Control has a plugin architecture which might help http://cruisecontrol.sourceforge.net/main/plugins.html

Answer 2

I see at least two ways to approach this:

1. You write an external tool which parses CC.NET's XML log files for a project (stored in buildlogs subdirectory by default), calculates statistics and writes a HTML report. This is probably easier to do, but it won't be directly integrated with CC.NET.
2. You write a CC.NET plug-in to do this. You'll need to do a bit of investigating in this case. My guess the starting point would be to look at the source code of some existing plug-in.

Here are some links about CCNET plugins:

• http://confluence.public.thoughtworks.org/display/CCNET/Custom+Builder+Plug-in
• BrekiLabeller - my own plug-in, useful if you want to see how a plug-in can be implemented.

Answer 3

you can use the statistics publisher, http://confluence.public.thoughtworks.org/display/CCNET/Statistics+Publisher and you can display them via project statistics plugin

Answer 4

So how much time (in avg.) the build was broken?

Answer 5

So my eventual solution wasn't ideal, but it was easy to do and it works:

I had CC.NET send build emails to an email address (we'll call it build_emails@build_statistics.com). Then I use a ruby script to get the emails via imap and process them to determine our build failure time.

I didn't go the route of directly parsing the xml because I would have had to parse every xml file in the timeframe to build up a timeline and then go over the timeline to make my calculations. It just seemed too complicated to get a simple statistic like this.

Answer 6

I like cc.net, but in this case TeamCity just does this for you. It has lots of other great statistics too. It's free for less than 20 projects.