Team Development with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server

• Customers.
Each consumer has different needs in terms of build quality and frequency. In general,
build consumers can be divided into two groups; those who need predictable, scheduled
builds and those who need rapid, event-driven builds. Scheduled builds are most
commonly daily builds but can occur more or less frequently. Event-driven builds are
usually initiated by a check-in and are designed to give the development team rapid
feedback. If your development team has problems with breaking builds, consider using a
gated check-in model, where check-ins are tested before they are allowed into the source
tree and are rejected if the tests fail.
Review Solution Scenarios
Choose solution scenarios based on how closely their purpose and build consumers match
your team’s situation. When in doubt, use the simplest build scenario possible, such as a
scheduled build, and add more complex scenarios only if necessary.
Build Scenarios
The following are the most common Team Build scenarios:
• Team with single daily builds. Most teams rely on a scheduled build in order to
provide consistent binaries to their test team and other users.
• Team with daily builds and continuous integration builds. Some teams choose to
use continuous integration builds in order to provide rapid feedback to their
developers upon every check-in. Although a pure continuous integration build works
well for small teams, larger teams are likely to overload their build server due to highfrequency
check-ins and longer build times. When this happens, a rolling build can be
used to build less frequently without giving up too much time between check-in and
build feedback.
• Team with multiple build labs, each performing daily build and continuous
integration builds. Very large teams are likely to require more complex solutions to
improve build quality and timeliness. You can use gated check-ins to reduce build
breaks by rejecting bad check-ins before they make it into source control. Teams that
branch can use multiple build servers, one per branch, to keep the builds focused on
each branch’s purpose. For example, integration branches create integration builds,
while development branches create development builds.
Scheduled Builds
A scheduled build is a time-based build based on a fixed time frequency. The purpose of
a scheduled build is to produce consistently reliable builds that can be used to gain
feedback on the quality of the build. Scheduled builds are usually daily builds, but they
could occur more or less frequently depending upon your needs.
The consumers of a scheduled build are most often:
• Test team.
• Internal build adopters.