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Delegating Is Hard

automated builds, software development

Sitting in my cube at work at 8:30pm on a Saturday it hit me. I really need to work on my delegating skills.

After catching up on a bunch of todo items, notes, and emails from the past week I delved into an existing problem with one of our projects builds. It involves cruisecontrol and maven 2 and all sorts of problems getting maven to do the checkout from cvs or using the <exec> tag to execute cvs from the command line. Anyway after about an hour of tinkering I managed to get it running again, though the build is still failing due to some issues with maven. (Did I mention I’m still not impressed with maven. It appears to handle everything seamlessly and then you end up in these nasty configuration battles over integrating it with cruisecontrol or even CVS. Ant is verbose, but straightforward and has tons better documentation, books, and examples.)

Anyway the point is I haven’t really delegated out the build box successfully. I’ve talked to at least two of my developers about it, but I haven’t really handed over the reins to anyone. I really like build tools and I don’t want to give them up. Thus I’m at work late on a Saturday trying to do too much.

Ed Gibbs @ August 19, 2006

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4 Comments

  1. Todd Costella August 21, 2006 @ 7:36 am

    Hey Ed.

    I’ve been reading your Blog for a while and find we’re living parallel lives. Thanks for all your insight and musings.

    I can relate to the delegation point. I do find it easier to slip back into ‘developer’ mode. The tasks tend to be more fun than ‘team lead’ mode.

    On the build system point, we moved from Cruise Control to LuntBuild and more recently to QuickBuild from PMEase. LuntBuild is an opensource builder and QuickBuild is a commercial implementation. It is great and the support I’ve gotten from PMEase is nothing short of spectacular.

    Anyway, best of luck with things.

    Todd

  2. Dave Nicolette August 21, 2006 @ 9:31 am

    We’ve found that on our projects that use maven, we’ve ended up having one person dedicated to babysitting the build scripts. It’s been the only way we’ve found to keep everything up and running properly. So I would agree with you that maven has some good features, but it can be hard to live with.

  3. Ed Gibbs August 21, 2006 @ 6:17 pm

    Thanks for the pointer on luntbuild. I hadn’t looked at it for a few years, and it appears to have progressed. Maybe I’ll delegate someone to look into it.

    Good to know as well, that I’m not alone about being a bit underwhelmed with all the maven goodness.

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