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Electric Cloud focuses on relevant parts of builds to boost performance


By Jeff Feinman
December 14, 2009 —  Electric Cloud is trying to help developers eliminate unnecessary parts of software builds without sacrificing the quality of those builds.

SparkBuild, released today, is a free software builder that is based on the concept of what Electric Cloud calls “build avoidance,” which avoids parts of the build process to obtain performance gains. SparkBuild leverages Electric Cloud’s ElectricAccelerator build accelerator and ElectricInsight build analyzer to identify parts of a build that aren’t relevant to a developer, so as to skip them. It tries to help developers avoid unnecessary work by automatically reducing a full build to the smallest subset of critical changes.

Typically in a software build, there are many dependencies between applications and components, which might necessitate a full rebuild if something needs to be changed. But Electric Cloud’s solution can identify the dependencies among software parts and show a developer only parts that would need to be changed.

Usman Muzaffar, vice president of product management for Electric Cloud, claimed that SparkBuild can make developer builds 10 times faster. He explained that many developers do incremental builds, which consist of rebuilding changes in a build instead of an entire software stack.

“Every time they’re doing those, they’re faced with an ugly choice,” Muzaffar said. “Either they can build the slow and safe way—making sure all parts are put together actively and correctly—or the fast and dangerous way—taking some shortcuts, but at the risk of not really knowing what just got built and not really being guaranteed you’re building the right stuff. SparkBuild can make developer builds both fast and safe, and get you much faster performance on average.”

Incremental building can be expensive and can take between 10 to 20 minutes to run, according to Scott Castle, senior product manager for Electric Cloud. SparkBuild looks to lower that time and cost. If a developer is building on the MySQL database, for instance, and he or she wants to check in a change without running a full build, SparkBuild can figure out how to do so without affecting other parts of the process, he said.

“One of my software developers here at Electric Cloud came up with this idea because he has a very similar problem,” Castle said. “Our software stack is made up of about 20 components. If I’m working on one component, I can’t afford to rebuild the whole product. Figuring out what to rebuild takes so long that I really almost have to resort to building this stuff by hand. And that defeats the whole purpose of having a build tool.”

Information and details on builds are displayed in a GUI, which Muzaffar said can pinpoint errors down to an individual line of code. said he added that the GUI shows build times and components that may be causing failures.

The SparkBuild website has blog posts, forums and training videos to help developers learn about SparkBuild.


Related Search Term(s): build management, Electric Cloud


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