Daniel Sniderman

In the recent past, it was common for Windows applications to be manually compiled and built directly on a developer's desktop computer. This caused many problems. For example, the developer may have had a different version of a component used in the application, or you couldn't build when he was on vacation let alone left the company, and it introduced a high degree of error if the developer made changes for future features (or testing code) without realizing it was included in the build. The next evolutionary phase was "The Build Machine," a dedicated machine for the build. However, the effort of actually building applications was largely either manual or a custom "one-off" automated process. Integrating the efforts of a team of developers was often a painful process because this was the first time their code was tested as an integrated unit. In the early 2000s, ... (more)