Automation

Investment in automation is a key component of our ability to deliver a broad range of solutions with a compact development team. The Wombat philosophy is to automate all repetitive tasks and provide an infrastructure that makes it easy for development teams spread across eight time zones to work as a unit to deliver reliable high performance cross platform code.

Some key components include:

• Automated builds (with email notifications) of all products three times daily on every platform, O/S and product flavor for all active CVS branches.
• Automated nightly performance and regression tests for all active CVS branches that have been updated in the previous day.

Ciaran Kennedy, Managing Director, Hosting & Managed Services, at Wombat, points out the scale of the problem with managing genuinely cross platform software development. "Take the Wombat C++ MAMA API for example. If a developer makes a code change, this change could lead to unforeseen knock on effects on any of the O/S permutations we support, Solaris, Solaris x86, 9 flavors of Linux, or VC6 and VC7 on Windows. Similarly there could problems on one or all of the messaging platforms MAMA supports, TIBCO Rendezvous, Mantara Elvin or LBM. There are almost 45 possible permutations where a problem could arise due to a single code change. Then add 10 more developers!"

"It's impossible to support this much variability manually, irrespective of how well the software is architected," added Kennedy. "Before automation we had a massive test load, now all these checks are carried out automatically in the background, with notification emails when there is a problem."