What a ridiculous company, they are engaged in scrum tools

Today, I received the extremeprogramming API@ Yahoogroups.com): "The benefits of automated building and continuous integration are required so that their VP can take a while to optimize their build scripts, in order to shorten the time from 3 to 4 days to 12 hours. Because their unit tests run for too long and building often fails due to unit test failures ."

This is not ridiculous, because it is common in many companies, but when it happens to a software company that claims to be "agile" and buys scrum management tools, it becomes a bit ridiculous.

But it's no wonder that they are engaged in scrum. Scrum doesn't matter whether you build, unit test, or continuous integration.

After a smile, I pointed out some possible bad smell and possible countermeasures. Of course, it doesn't mean the countermeasure to persuade them to VP. -- Hahaha.

• As a developer, it is no conflict between building and developing new functions first. It is the way that developers develop things themselves. Why do you blame VP for not giving you time?
  • Because we have been trying to favor VP by developing features quickly and forgetting what we should do-just rush to work and wait for the debt to rise. VP said, "What you owe yourself, work overtime on your own"
• Long build time
  • It is estimated that there is a lot of waste to compile and package scripts.
  • For C/C ++, you can use distributed compilation.
• Unit test time is too long
  • Writing is not a unit test.
    • It may be integrated testing (such as the talk to DB, file system, and network) that relies on many basic environments, which often have problems.
    • It may be that these integration tests are not well written, there are many wait (10 s), and there are many testing scenarios in one test.
  • There are really a lot of unit tests (it is unlikely that thousands of unit tests can be completed within minutes)
    • If there are many failures, it is likely that there is no basic practice in continuous integration (six-step commit), and developers do not run unit tests locally.
    • No parallel running policy is used to shorten the time

-----------------------------

Original message:

"Can anyone point me to some real numbers on the benefits of automating the builds and continuous integration.

Perhaps there's a good white paper on this topic.

I don't need to be convinced, but trying to make a case to our VP on doing this first rather than working on new features.

We do have automation builds but the unit tests take forever to run and often times the build fails due to unit test failures.

We want to make a substantial effort to get to builds in 12 hours from 3 or 4 days.

Just hard to quanw.the benefits.

Thanks
Jack"

Company: